Intensive developments are being carried by AIFE, the french IT agency of the Ministry of finances on the technical specification of the next e-Invoicing platform CPP 2017 (1). In the course of discussions to define the common set of requirements, AIFE has re ensured the public sector and SME ‘s representatives as well that the enablement of several thousands of public authorities will be achieved through a single gateway able to transact several thousands of invoice in 2017.
When dealing with public procurement, interoperability is not only a matter of format and the post-award process little more than just empty words. By sending an invoice, a supplier claims for a payment, triggering several cascading processes in the accounting system of contracting authorities, involving reconciliation or external services such as public treasury.
Easing life of businesses generally goes hand in hand with securing the process to payment. This point was stressed by the act of enablement -article 1 (law of simplification) « By offering new services, such as online tracking ability of the processing status of invoices issued. ». The platform will therefore offer a monitoring of the invoice lifecycle, notifying several progression status to the sender.
Along with this status, the platform is expected to perform at least three levels of validation in entry. A technical validation applied to formats, syntax and cardinality ; a second level on the data structure such as checking if a field is not empty, absence of reference to order number if requested by the buyer, party identifiers etc. A third validation will be held by the recipient service itself.
For ensuring an appropriate routing , every public body will be identified by a National SIRET number with potentially an added extension for identifying the service. The directory of all CA’s is expected to be published and potentially electronically invoked.
For both populations of suppliers and buyers, CPP 2017, will provide three potential business interfaces, classic EDI, portal or service modes. Depending on their choice, any supplier will be able to access directly via the current CHORUS portal or a service provider. The first mode is expected to be enough technologically neutral to offer a solution at zero cost of entry.
The solution contemplates several structured (XML) or unstructured (PDF) formats in entry, each one reverting to the unique semantic pivotal format. Assuming conformance to the future EN core semantic model currently under development at the european level; the platform will accept two basic structured formats, one currently bound to UBL 2.0 and accepting PEPPOL invoices received from the European network another to CII UN/CEFACT, plus one specific to public sector internal exchanges (PES V2).