e-invoicing standard

e-invoice as NFT with metadata and smart contract (self-invoicing, periodic invoices,...)

I've built smart contract before, I'm a senior developer, I use to have a company selling to other companies through ERP/EDI prior

"The mass adoption of e-invoicing within the EU would lead to significant economic benefits and it is estimated that moving from paper to e- invoices will generate savings of around EUR 240 billion over a six-year period"
source: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=COM:2010:0712:FIN:en:PDF
Electronic communications between companies are criticals and need a better protocol based on blockchain technology and immutable exchange.
Companies need to exchange documents in order to collaborate. Documents can be sales orders, invoices, transport bills etc.
Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) digitalizes those exchanges. In a centralized world of EDI/ERP companies exchange data through a long and error prone process of data transformation and ingestion.
EDI projects have several drawbacks induced by their design:

• Point-to-point communication: In order to communicate, both endpoint must be online
• Transformation and translation: Document are transformed to suit each system in place
• Duplicated data with no single source of trust: data are created in every company's solution part of the exchange, based on a transformation process that can evince some information to fit their models.
• Lost documents: Error in information processing leads to loss of documents meaning loss of sales orders
• Costly projects with a lot of prerequisites: Before communicating companies must agree on the document structure and nomenclature, plus they need to set up a communication channel.
• Storage and backup: In order to secure the data, data are saved in an hybrid cloud environment that is costly. Also data storages are prone to cyber attack and hardware failure.
  Blockchain technology can bring a lot of plus value in this kind of project.
• Decentralized and asynchronous communication
• Replay communication
• Single source of trust - immutable storage
• Full exchange chain
• Increased ROI
• Standard data schema based on smart contract and CIP

For the Cardano project, it's an opportunity to bring a lot of transactions and usage. Moreover, companies will be encouraged to build and maintain stakepool bringing more epochs and more blocks in Ouroboros. Their stake pool will increase their ROI and can be seen as a financial investment.

Project phases:

The first document that can be used to initiate the project could be invoices. Electronic invoicing is a main goal for CFO, in European countries it is mandatory(1).
We will not recreate an EDI nor an ERP. We will provide adaptors for network communication to Cardano blockchain smart contracts and addresses.

• Phase1: Create a "Core Invoice Usage Specification" (CIUS) based on EU standard EN16931 to Cardano native NFT and metadata based on modern syntax and binary serialization
• Phase2: Build an eDelivery service based on Cardano blockchain
• Phase 3: Build smart contract for other invoicing schema (self invoicing, periodic invoicing, etc.)
• next: we will implement other documents and contracts.

Timeline:

First months will be dedicated to create a Proof of concept and an implementation project to take part. We need to register as a service provider as an ongoing project.
We must, in parallel, animate a community to build Cardano Improvement Proposals and extend protocol to suit special needs that will emerge.
When the first version of the smart contract is ready we will start shipping ERP/EDI modules for flagship solutions.
Sales force must start working with vendors. We want to reach a goal of 3 customers of a mid size (based on number of external communication throughput) to improve our modules and to start building customer references in a 6 month timeframe.
Vendors will help us to bring Cardano infrastructure in the B2B world expanding our current community in the next 12 month

Improvement:

We must leave space for service companies and vendors to deploy our solution to new customers based on a partnership.
We can approach organisations like GS1 to help adoption of this technology.

Marketing and Sales:

The marketing and sales team must organize the network to drive adoption and educate companies on advantages of blockchain EDI projects
Sales team can build partnerships with vendors and service companies specialized in ERP/EDI projects

KPI:

Number of new company hold stakepool by year: 3 after a year
Number of invoices exchanged by month: 100k/month after a year

Asking funds usage:

Purchase standard documents: 2500$
Marketing and communication: 5000$
POC: 15 000$
We want to validate phase1 during fund3 then go further when the proof of concept is validated. We want to be ready for the Goguen mainnet release.

Revenu:

Our business model can be based on a small fee per transaction that the smart contract keeps or by selling module licences.