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The combination of XML and PDF for human-readable documents with the power of digital signatures is undeniably a proven and accepted way to address global e-invoicing regulatory requirements.
Buyers and suppliers must be prepared to demonstrate a comprehensive audit trail for tax authorities or auditors that examine each step of their e-invoicing processes.
Audit trails must correlate electronic invoice data with the underlying exchange of goods or services.
The power of digitally signed PDF solutions is that they provide evidence of an invoice’s integrity and authenticity when trading partners are unable to on agree on a structured format or tax authorities have not regulated a standard format or process.
Authenticity is particularly important when sellers send invoices to tens of thousands of customers who might not accept electronic documents due to systems or information-technology limitations. For example, any customer can print a PDF and rekey the data, which creates an integrity risk.
However, when structured standardized formats are agreed upon by trading partners, whether using Brazil’s Nota Fiscal Eletrônica (NFe) and Conhecimento de Transporte (CTe), Mexico’s Comprobante Fiscal Digital por Internet (CFDI), or Ariba’s commerce eXtensible Markup Language (cXML), digital signatures offer the highest standard for authenticity and integrity.
On the Ariba Network, trading partners ensure data integrity through their mutual agreement to use cXML or other regulated format in Latin American countries.
Furthermore, buyers can maintain the integrity of source data by using business rules on the Ariba Network, such as:
Ariba Network also conforms to regulatory requirements in Latin America that mandates signing and registry of invoice data with local tax authorities.
The above integrity checks, combined with the application of a country-specific signature of the data, provide trading partners the highest quality audit trail, ensuring that data legally issued by the Ariba Network matches data in their respective ERP and legal archives.
Furthermore, Ariba uses the corresponding PDF to satisfy human-readable requirements.
For example, the Brazilian PDF is either the Documento Auxiliar do Nota Fiscal Eletrônica (DANFe) or Documento Auxiliar do Conhecimento de Transporte (DACTe) depending on the type of invoice: goods or freight.
In other countries, where cXML serves as the tax invoice, Ariba generates a PDF human-readable copy of the digitally sized document. Upon the advice of our tax advisors, the PDF copy includes the text, “Copy of Invoice - Not a Tax Invoice” to clarify to customers and tax authorities that the cXML invoice remains the legal document.
Buying organizations can see the appropriate country-specific PDF presented at the top of the page of both invoice and invoice reconciliation documents. Ariba solutions use the same approach for images created by Invoice Conversion Services invoices. These PDFs play an important role in the exception handing and approval processing of invoices and are therefore presented prominently to users.
Ariba provides trading partners tools to archive the data, PDF, audit trail, and related supplier attachments by creating links to the entries in their respective financial systems.
For more information on the Ariba tax invoicing business controls, e-signing, e-archiving, and the role of PDFs, please see the Ariba Network Guide to Invoicing.
