Electronic invoicing solution
Business Document Exchange (BDXR) for Electronic Invoicing (eInvoicing). In a ‘bricks and mortar’ economy, businesses need to locate and find one another’s details (such as delivery address and bank account details) in order to deliver products and send payment respectively.
In a digital economy, business use electronic transactions provided by digital service providers. These electronic transactions are provided via securely hosted APIs that reside in the Cloud and are identified by a Digital Address in the form of a Universal Resource Locator (URL or Service Endpoint).
The Digital Locator Service provides a robust and secure mechanism for registering businesses and linking them to a digital service provider. Once registered, the businesses Digital Address is then discoverable via standard internet DNS services, enabling the business to securely transact digitally using a digital transaction framework.
One such framework is the European PEPPOL Framework. This framework provides for the automated direct and electronic exchange of invoices between software systems of trading partners, such as a business and its customers.
For eInvoicing to work all participants must utilise the same standards and technical specifications. The IQ Office Digital Locator Service uses the European PEPPOL Framework.
The PEPPOL e-invoice interoperability framework utilises a four-corner messaging topology model. In this model the business supplying the service is corner one. The second corner is an Access Point (software) which communicates with corner three the Access Point (software) of the buyer via a centralised Service Metadata Locator (SML). The SML is used to identify the digital location (in the form of a URL not a physical or billing address) to enable the system to send and receive messages for a given participant (such as a business invoicing its customers). The end customer, the receiver of goods or services, is the fourth corner of the model.
The Digital Locator Service provides SML functionality and it extends the SML as it:
- Provides a modern RESTful web service interface
- Provides a management interface (API and GUI)
- Provides a PEPPOL Authority with autonomy over their jurisdiction
- Provides localised configuration of registration and validation processes
- Implements robust service level monitoring and reporting
- BDXR standard compliant
- High performance and scalable for global adoption
