Things are moving in the European standardisation arena. Recently, The European Multi-stakeholder Platform on ICT Standardisation, which includes European standardisation organisations, Member States and relevant stakeholders, has evaluated the OASIS Universal Business Language version 2.1 (UBL 2.1) ICT technical specification against the criteria set out in Annex II of Regulation 1025/2012 and has given a positive advice to its identification by the Commission (see evaluation report).
In essence, the European MSP group has recommended to the EC that UBL be acknowledged as a European Standard Also, UBL has been going through the paces for ISO standardization and some experts believe it also shouldn’t be long before it is also an ISO/IEC standard. It is currently being scrutinised.
Free UBL Conference
Because of this, Ken Holman is organising a free symposium on UBL. The UBL International 2014 in Stockholm, Sweden combines a free half-day symposium on 2 December 2014 titled “Building on the Foundation” and commercial training December 3 and 4, 2014 (provided there is sufficient pre-registration for the training) for OASIS UBL and OASIS code lists. Please see http://UBLconference.com for more details and the registration form.
How does this relate to electronic invoicing?
Meanwhile, there is a there is Commission Decision C(2014) 4142 final of 25.6.2014 “Setting-up the second European Multi-Stakeholder Forum on Electronic Invoicing (einvoicing)” , stating that one of the forum’s tasks is to “to support and monitor work leading to the adoption of a European standard for the semantic data model of an electronic invoice”
The question is how these two things relate to one another. Perhaps we just have to wait and acknowledge that standardisation doesn’t necessarily means that there will be less formats to choose from (read: simplification/harmonisation). That will almost probably only be case when e-invoicing in Europe becomes mandatory…..
es on