People invent their own standard to make their own lives easier at the cost of making everyone else's lives miserable which is exactly what the European Committee for Standardization was intended to prevent.
The invoicing standard is an attempt to mitigate reverse charge fraud by gathering more machine-readable data. Some countries even demand that b2b invoices are sent to the country, which then dispatches a copy to the recipient.
Knowing this background, it's pretty clear why the EU is making it mandatory.
Personally, in the abstract I like the idea to mandate the use of an open standard, I think we have way too many inefficiencies from treating many things as text documents that could be data structures. I don't like this particular standard though, it's bloated and the result of a typical top-down process.
I much prefer it when there are competing standards for a while, and one or a couple of winner emerge on technical merits. THEN I have no objections to a regulatory body picking a standard and mandating it.
If tidiness and neatness are not a good enough argument to mandate this taxpayer savings, time efficiency, and better software should be.
Companies who insist on being precious about their favored invoice format can invest their own time and money on conversion tools that let them convert invoices they get into whatever format they like for their own internal records and convert them to meet the standard again when sending invoices out. That leaves them free to use what they want without making everyone else deal with their mess.
You must be new to the internet /s
A company does not gain anything by sending "better" invoices that follow a standard. Only if they receive standardized invoices, but usually not enough to pay extra for it. The fact that standardized invoices haven't happened yet without legislation should be proof of that
[1] https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/cobol-zos/6.4.0?topic=arithmetic...
- It's a barrier for small businesses, or those which seldomly invoice, such as craft and hobby businesses (particularly remote online businesses).
- Large companies see eInvoicing as a cost saving method and force it upon their vendors. This reduces the need to make it mandatory and provides a financial incentive for companies to adopt eInvoicing (i.e. more carrot, less stick.)
The EU has a solid trend of finding ways to self-harm when introducing reforms. This self-harm story segue's into how the EU is considering implementing an Australian-style social media restriction for children:
Quote from abc.net.au below:
European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen told the audience she had been "inspired" by Australia's "bold" move to introduce the ban.
"As a mother of seven children and grandmother of five, I share their view," she said.
The European Parliament has since passed a non-legislative report that would set a minimum age of 16 for social media, while allowing those aged 13 to 15 with parental consent.
-- end quote --
Here the EU is walking down the path of another bad implementation.
Limiting the age for social media only works if it's mandatory for all children, otherwise kids will just pester their parents for access. In the EU's plan the parents become the "bad guy" in that arrangement, the home becomes the battleground for obtaining access to social media.
The EU's plan also means that social media remains relevant for young people, where access may be needed for arranging social activities and sports, and those which don't have it are either inconvenienced or miss out. Meanwhile the Australian implementation removes that purpose as no kids are allowed on the platform, thus there are no "haves" and "have nots" kids.
Finally, and probably most importantly, advertisers, data brokers, and bad actors will still continue to target children through social media networks, since they will still be there in useful numbers.
In this scenario we can anticipate that business practices will shift to the common standard over time, and that would include the accounting software used by new businesses: resulting in a phased conversion with minimal disruptions to running a business.
Scale is a much bigger deal than the complexity of any one invoice. When you're dealing with hundreds of thousands if not millions of invoices from all over the place it makes sense to have it standardized so that software can be developed to do most your work with those invoices automatically and consistently.
I've worked on automating high volume document processing from a much smaller number of companies (mainly just from those within the US), just one or two outliers can massively expand your codebase and when those companies are free to change their formats on a whim in whatever why suits them it can break everything in ways that can be immediately catastrophic or very subtle but no less disastrous.