Re: electronic invoices

[Jeff Kowalczyk <..hidden..>]

Michael Richardson wrote:
> I don't want to assume they are on the same server.
> I basically want to email you an invoice, and you be able to "upload"
> it in such a way that it creates a purchase order. Probably you don't
> want to actually commit it -- it needs to be edited/adjusted, but in
> many cases, it might be just fine the way it is.
>
> For regular transactions between two companies, this would win.
> 
> EBXML does this at the Fortune500 scale of enterprise, but seems to
> have significant difficulties scaling down to the 4 person company,
> where bookeeping is a PITA.

If you are obliged to design an in-house serialization and deserialization
format for Orders and/or Invoices, YAML would be a very usable choice.

Human-readable (and editable, per your use case), with good support in
perl and other languages used in integration projects.

http://yaml.org