Processing electronic invoices

The European standard on eInvoicing states that a receiving party may only claim compliance with the core invoice model if that receiving party accepts invoices that comply with the core invoice model in general, or with a CIUS, that is itself compliant with the core invoice model.

Directive 2014/55 on electronic invoicing states in Article 7 that the Member States shall ensure that public contracting authorities and contracting entities receive and process electronic invoices which comply with the European standard on eInvoicing [EN 16931].

How that information is processed is not dictated by the directive and the receiving public contracting authority has significant flexibility in how this is done. This includes the following options, as examples.

• The invoice may be automatically read in full into the accounting system, booked and matched against supporting documents for completely automated processing.
• Selected information may be read into the receiving system, but the rest is made available by allowing manual viewing of the invoice.
• The electronic invoice (eInvoice) may be converted to a pdf format and processed as a pdf invoice by manual entry.
• The eInvoice may be printed on paper and processed as a paper invoice by manual entry.

It is not necessary that all received eInvoices are processed in the same way if requirements of the relevant accounting regulations, such as on traceability and archiving, are fulfilled. The directive does not prevent the receiver from processing invoices with different levels of automation based on different factors including:

• Received content. As an example, if received invoices include the necessary details, they may be processed automatically. However, the eInvoices that lack these details could be processed in a partial or fully manual way.
• Invoice specification. A receiver may use a CIUS (to ensure that necessary details are provided) and/or direct eInvoices based on this CIUS to automated invoice processing. In parallel, the receiver re-directs other invoices to partially or fully manual processing.
• Invoices from selected senders can be directed to a specific process.

A key requirement is that how the invoice is processed by the receiver should not affect the sender, i.e. in any case, the sender can be sure that his invoice is processed, and all content is acknowledged.

Different processing of different content

When paper invoices are processed the content of the invoice is typically processed in one of the following ways.

• Some information is entered into the accounting system, such as who the seller is, total amounts and due date.
• Some information is viewed by the accountant or the person who approves the invoice but is not entered into the accounting system. An example of this data may be line-level details such as prices.
• A paper invoice also contains various information, some of which is pre-printed on the paper, that the receiver consciously knows that he does not need to view or enter into his accounting system. Such information may be in the invoice for different reasons, such as to fulfil legal requirements, e.g. the sellers' address or phone number. This information may be relevant under later circumstances. Therefore, the receiver may ignore the information during the invoice processing, but he can not reject having received it.

When processing eInvoices, the same applies. The receiver may program his system to import certain information from the invoice, his accountant may visually read some information when provided, and some information may be intentionally ignored. The decision on how different eInvoice information is handled is the responsibility of the receiver. The seller can assume the eInvoice was received. All information mentioned in an eInvoice must be archived in the same way as a paper invoice.