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Re: [LUG] Billing/Invoice formats

 

On Sat, Mar 28, 2009 at 08:44:45AM +0000, Tom Potts wrote:
> On Saturday 28 March 2009 07:41, Simon Waters wrote:
> > Tom Potts wrote:
> > > I'm probably repeating myself here but...
> > > Does anyone know of OPEN xml standards for billing/invoicing/financial
> > > stuff so I can try and persuade people that I do transactions with to
> > > send/recieve this stuff and push/pull it stright from my various packages
> > > and and not have to go through billions of receipts - or worse print out
> > > Pointless Document Format invoices and then type them in again!
> > > Or failing that anyone want to help define some simple formats we can all
> > > use?

<snip>
> >
> > Neil/Henry/others may be able to advise on other formats for more
> > financial stuff.
> There is a thing called XBRL but I cant find any examples of things like 
> invoices or receipts. Xstensible Business REPORTING Language.

What you want to look at is UK Taxonomy IFRS eg http://www.xbrl.org/uk/TechGuidance

XBRL is a reporting language and if XBRL is mandatory for Company Tax returns by 
March 2011 then accounting packages - or their auditors - will have two choices
- Build a translation engine that converts company accounts into XBRL
- Derive their own taxonomy for business users and store that

SAP are already releasing packages  http://www.webwire.com/ViewPressRel.asp?aId=87921

Please also see Companies House (http://ewf.companieshouse.gov.uk/xbrl)

I could not google any data on accounting packages that are XBRL compliant: there 
was quite a lot that basically said this was something small businesses are not 
interested in eg

http://www.accountingweb.co.uk/cgi-bin/item.cgi?id=189122&d=1025&dateformat=%25o-%25B

XBRL will have taxonomies for sales and receipts (if nothing else to submit your tax 
return to HMRC you will need to report income and expenses). Whether they have 
taxonomies for particular products is a separate issue.


> >
> > I suspect "what others already support" is always going to be favourite
> > - so ask them.....
> I'm going to be asking IT-primitives - MS users and users of proprietary 
> accounts packages that will have myopic views of the requirements and the 
> desire to live in small cages.

If their accounting packages are XBRL compliant and from the articles above it looks 
like they will be at some point, then all you need to do is persuade the software 
makers to allow them to export invoices in XBRL

Mind you as a word of caution

http://rcl-systems.blogspot.com/2007/02/uk-xbrl-and-gaap-reporting.html


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Henry
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