The Business Payments Coalition: A B2B Invoicing Standard

Standardized Invoicing: An Idea Whose Time Has Come 

The U.S. has no invoicing standards, and attempts to create some uniformity have generally not worked well. Payment and invoicing portals shift the work from one trading partner onto the other, and EDI systems — expensive to set up and maintain — don’t always talk to each other.  

The Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis took the lead in searching for a solution to the problem of creating a standardized data exchange framework for electronic payments. Over time, this idea has evolved into the Business Payments Coalition (BPC), an organization now comprised of over 800 business-to-business stakeholders. Together they are moving ever closer to a standardized e-invoicing format. 

Within the next year or two, the BPC expects to roll out this standard. While it won’t be mandatory, it should make life easier for both AP and AR — and probably for software vendors as well. Find out how it’s expected to work and what it means to your operation by downloading the white paper, “The Business Payments Coalition: A B2B Invoicing Standard.”