eInvoice REST API

This page documents a national e-Invoicing REST API standard. The work is governed by the Australian Digital Business Council.

The basic idea is that accounting software product vendors will build support for the standard so that any business can send an invoice to any other business so long as they know each other's business identifier (usually an ABN) and, optionally, have established a trading agreement to exchange electronic documents.

How it works

It works like a city phone book. If party A wants to send an invoice to party B then party A will lookup the invoice service information for party B in the registry and then send the invoice to the specified location using mutually supported technical standards.

Each party publishes information about their invoice service (supported documents & transports, certificates, URL end points) to a registry. In most cases, the accounting software package will do this for their customers. The registry entry is only updated whenever there is a change to any party's technical profile.
Optionally, a party may specify (via their service information registry entry) that a trading agreement is required before they will accept electronic documents. In such cases, either party can initiate the trading request and, if agreed by the other party, the whitelist is updated with the relevant identifiers and the parties can exchange documents.
Bidirectional document excahnge happens simply by looking up the other party's service data and certificate, encrypting the invoice data and sending it to the other oarty.
Note that all interfaces are implemented as RESTFul services in accoridance with the Australian Government API design guide
.

The API specifications

Are published to swaggerhub.

Sequence diagrams and a little more details "how it works" information is provided for each of the three phases in the overview:

The Reference Implementations

Are maintained in associated github repos

Our Timeline

This project is run in accordance with the Australian government digital transformation office service design and delivery methodology. We kicked off early May 2016 with the "discovery" phase and we aim to deliver the following milestones:

"alpha" REST API specification for all services by June 30 2016 (registry publishing, trading agreements, end-point lookup, and e-invoice transaction)
"alpha" implementation prototypes of the SMP register and e-invoice service end points by July 31 2016.
"beta" REST API specification (updated with lessons learned from the alpha implementation) by 15 August 2016
"beta" open source toolkits for SMP registers and e-invoice end points by 30 Sept 2016

Our Team

Are you a software developer that has a product that provides any part of the procure to pay process? If so then your users would benefit from end-to-end automation with their trading partners. No more scanning of paper invoices or re-keying and uploading PDF attachments. We welcome your participation in this project. All standard specifications are licensed under Creative Commons and all code will be redistributable open source under Apache 2 license.

The team so far

SAP Australia, representing a large proportion of the largest organizations in Australia. SAP runs the Ariba B2B ecommerce network with over 2million global organizations on the network. The alpha prototype will include connecting up the Ariba network
MYOB, representing over half a million small businesses in Australia that send or receive invoices and would benefit from deeper integration
Westpac, one of Australia's largest financial institutions. Bringing their experience as the operation of the largest superannuation B2B gateway and as a founder member of the NPP (new payments platform) which will revolutionize payments in Australia
the department of industry innovation and science. As the chair of the e-invoicing governance group, the department will ensure open governance for the project. The department also provides the VanGuard service which can validate ABN ownership and so inject trust into the network.