by Serguey Shinder
For as long as anybody here can remember, our invoices have been documents. Printed at first, then PDFs attached to an email, read at the other end by somebody in an accounts team who knew roughly what we sold, what their site manager had ordered, and how much benefit of the doubt to give us. Late in 2025 the government said that VAT invoices between businesses would have to be sent electronically, as structured data, from 2029. I put it on a list of things to think about in 2027.
Then in the spring of 2026 our largest housebuilding customer asked whether we would send invoices in that structured form as a trial. We agreed, and over a month sent about two thousand three hundred that way. Their system checks each one on arrival against the purchase order and the delivery, line by line, before a person sees it. Just over a third went into their exception queue.
Almost none of the failures were about the format. They were about us. Counter staff had typed the customer's order reference however it was given to them, so it read Dave van 3 or plot 14 kitchen instead of a purchase order number. A delivery charge appeared as a line with a description and no product code. Credit notes said which invoice they corrected in a sentence, not in a field. Part deliveries were invoiced on one document covering three purchase orders, which a person could follow and a matching system could not.
Every one of those had worked for twenty years, because the reader was a person, and a person can tell that Dave van 3 is the order Dave rang through on Tuesday. A machine reading the same invoice compares it with three other records, and anything it cannot match becomes a question for somebody, which for us means waiting to be paid.
I expect this to be the shape of the next decade for anybody who sends invoices. Not a new file format, but the end of every informal arrangement that a reader used to smooth over. The invoice stops being a letter and becomes a claim against data the customer already has, and it either matches or it waits.
We have started where we can. The customer's order number is now a required field on every account order, checked against a pattern the customer gives us. Every charge, delivery and pallet included, has a product code. Credit notes carry the number of the invoice they correct. And each invoice covers a single purchase order. By August the exceptions at that customer were down to four per cent, and they were paying us eleven days sooner on average.
For twenty years our invoices were only as good as the patience of whoever opened them. The next reader will have none.
– Serguey Asael Shinder
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