Hacker News Reader

Comment by thrower123 | Hacker News Reader

I'm staggered by how many Fortune 500 companies are still faxing (!yes, faxing!) purchase orders and invoices around.

I'm surprised PDF is the default format for emailed invoices and purchase orders. 99% of the time someone has to key that PDF into another system and most of the time they can't copy and paste anything from the source PDF.

The state of the art is to have OCR of those PDFs to automate it. There's a huge amount of corporate/enterprise solutions that are just working around not doing proper interfaces and integrations. There's even the concept of "Robotic Process Automation" to make working around not being able to deliver working software sound cool.

Yep I use Doc parser as our customers don't want to setup custom EDR.

I can understand that but I can't understand why accounting packages don't have a standardized EDR for Purchase Orders and Invoices.

There are specs out there for example the GS1 spec, anything similar would be great.

In some parts of the world the PDFs get enriched with standardised XML. https://www.ferd-net.de/standards/what-is-zugferd/what-is-zu... (If you bill a government agency in Germany, the PDF has to contain the data in ZUGFeRD format.)

Wow our main supplier is German, and so is our tool supplier. I'll have to look into this.

ZUGFeRD is part of EU's creatively titled eInvoicing [0] project, compatible implementations should exist in other EU countries sooner or later.

[0]: https://ec.europa.eu/cefdigital/wiki/display/CEFDIGITAL/eInv...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com