
UsingQR – “Electronic” paper invoices using JSON and QR codes - r0muald
http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/UsingQR____Electronic__paper_invoices_using_JSON_and_QR_codes.html
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Roritharr
I'm in this space in Germany, where such ideas are always taken to their
logical extremes.

The current push towards creating some kind of standard for electronic
invoices (which would allow for a standardized data package to be transformed
into QR) is called ZUGFeRD.

[http://www.ferd-net.de/front_content.php?idcat=231](http://www.ferd-
net.de/front_content.php?idcat=231) The Zip(?!?) Containing the specification
can be found here:

[http://www.awv-net.de/updates/zugferd/zugferd10.zip](http://www.awv-
net.de/updates/zugferd/zugferd10.zip)

This is a push towards adding data to the PDF Metadata that would allow for
digitally reading of that electronic invoice by financial systems.

The current problem, from my reading, is that there is not enough players that
see a positive ROI for implementing this standard on a wide scale on systems
where it would make sense.

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dfox
In Czech republic, QR codes that encode payment details for invoices are
pretty common. It uses format called SPAYD for encoding of data which is
variation of vCard formatting (as proposed in the begining of this article).
Idea is that the same data in this format could also be transfered directly,
but that is not so common, probably because there also is widely supported
national standard for XML representation of entire invoices.

As for paperlessness: I routinely pay my cellphone bills by scanning said QR
code from computer screen.

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jon-wood
I routinely pay my cellphone bills by doing absolutely nothing (apart from
having a skim of my bank statement now and again). In the UK almost all
regular payments are done using Direct Debit, where you grant the company
billing you permission to transfer the money automatically. Sadly it lacks the
ability to specify an upper bound on that, but I've yet to have any issues in
practice so I'm not massively worried.

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randommodnar
Do not do this!!!

If you end up in a dispute with your phone company, you are putting yourself
at their mercy. It's waaay easier to fight a charge you haven't paid yet, then
to recover money you've already paid.

I've gone through hell because of this.

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jvhaarst
The bank doesn't allow you to roll back the automatic transfer of money ? Over
here (NL) all banks allow you to retrieve your money without any hassle within
about 2 months.

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kennywinker
Maybe the first usage of QR codes that actually makes sense to me. People
don't want to scan codes to go to urls, but they do want reliable ways take
messy human-reable data and put it into software. I hope more uses like this
come up.

QR codes were originally invented for inventory tracking. This is just an
extension of that.

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xfour
Only problem with this is it discourages shifting to paper-less business.
Remember when that was a goal of business and government. It's been so
successful via the fact that it's simply easier than shuffling papers about.
That being said, it is clever, sort-of a 255byte or so flash-rom storage on a
piece of paper.

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stingraycharles
I think that things like migrating away from a paper-less society is best done
in small steps. Who knows, things like these might actually speed up the
process!

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wereHamster
Some countries have already done it. It's not impossible or even that
difficult if you get behind it.

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userbinator
Why JSON?

QR can store binary data. Something like BSON would make a lot more sense,
given the tiny amount of storage in a QR code. Even ASN.1 seems more
appropriate than the silly data->ASCII->ASCII-structured-format->binary
encoding that's going on here, and admittedly in a lot of other transport
formats too.

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arnarbi
Not wanting to start flame wars, but consider CBOR instead of BSON (which only
really makes sense if you want to integrate with MongoDB).

[http://cbor.io/](http://cbor.io/)

~~~
yrro
I hadn't heard of this one before. I like that it has an RFC attached
(RFC7049) which contains in the appendices comparisons to other similar
systems such as MessagePack and BSON.

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thesimon
A german banking app already tried to do something similar [0], but used the
QR code to encode an URL containing all data instead. It seems a bit more
efficient.

But FWIW, it never got popular. I guess you can tell by the design of the
website.

[0] [http://www.bezahlcode.de](http://www.bezahlcode.de) (In German only)

Edit: It is actually not encoding all data of the invoice, but only the bank
details needed for the transfer.

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megapatch
It seems like a big step in the wrong direction. Sending invoices on paper
should become a thing of the past. But even if you are sending invoices
digitally, then choosing a common format would be the first problem. There are
already several existing formats, from Edifact to XML based Oagis, with no
winner in sight.

Rest assured that these petty JSON, vCard or the like ideas have little chance
to work in real life, specifically if you need to compress invoices into the
space limitations of QR codes... Real life B2B invoices are much more
demanding.

When it comes to payment information, that is much simpler to solve. You don't
even need to QR encode that, relatively simple forms with human readable
numbers can be read by modern smartphone banking apps. I have two different
installed (two different Swedish banks), works with most of the invoices I get
home. The few that still come on paper, that is.

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SOLAR_FIELDS
I wish there was some sort of financial/billing organization that could lay
the law down and establish one of these as standards, but since billing is
such a broad topic we may be lost on that front.

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thinkingkong
This is really cool. However adoption will be a really challenging issue. When
you end up having to upgrade your pos to print these qr codes (with little
incentive) you could just end up switching to a square-esque system instead.

I think the Json format is cool. Qr codes as a representation should be one
way of sharing it.

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josemrb
In Bolivia, starting this year, all the electronically printed invoices have
to include an QR code that contains the necessary information for tax filling.

Having one of the worst tax system in the world I'm surprised that somebody
had the idea to implement this mechanism.

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mongol
I throught I read this is this discouraged. The QR code amount can differ from
what is printed as text. It can yhen be used to scam a customer that does not
pay attention as well as make it legally unclear what the balance due really
is.

