blog/_Electronic__paper_invoices___using_vCard_in_a_QR_code.html

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   6     <title>Petter Reinholdtsen: "Electronic" paper invoices - using vCard in a QR code</title>
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  14  <h1>
  15      <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/">Petter Reinholdtsen</a>
  16
  17  </h1>
  18
  19 </div>
  20
  21
  22     <div class="entry">
  23       <div class="title">"Electronic" paper invoices - using vCard in a QR code</div>
  24       <div class="date">12th February 2013</div>
  25       <div class="body"><p>Here in Norway, electronic invoices are spreading, and the
  26 <a href="http://www.anskaffelser.no/e-handel/faktura">solution promoted
  27 by the Norwegian government</a> require that invoices are sent through
  28 one of the approved facilitators, and it is not possible to send
  29 electronic invoices without an agreement with one of these
  30 facilitators.  This seem like a needless limitation to be able to
  31 transfer invoice information between buyers and sellers.  My preferred
  32 solution would be to just transfer the invoice information directly
  33 between seller and buyer, for example using SMTP, or some HTTP based
  34 protocol like REST or SOAP.  But this might also be overkill, as the
  35 "electronic" information can be transferred using paper invoices too,
  36 using a simple bar code.  My bar code encoding of choice would be QR
  37 codes, as this encoding can be read by any smart phone out there.  The
  38 content of the code could be anything, but I would go with
  39 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VCard">the vCard format</a>, as
  40 it too is supported by a lot of computer equipment these days.</p>
  41
  42 <p>The vCard format support extentions, and the invoice specific
  43 information can be included using such extentions.  For example an
  44 invoice from SLX Debian Labs (picked because we
  45 <a href="http://www.linuxiskolen.no/slxdebianlabs/donations.html">ask
  46 for donations to the Debian Edu project</a> and thus have bank account
  47 information publicly available) for NOK 1000.00 could have these extra
  48 fields:</p>
  49
  50 <p><pre>
  51 X-INVOICE-NUMBER:1
  52 X-INVOICE-AMOUNT:NOK1000.00
  53 X-INVOICE-KID:123412341234
  54 X-INVOICE-MSG:Donation to Debian Edu
  55 X-BANK-ACCOUNT-NUMBER:16040884339
  56 X-BANK-IBAN-NUMBER:NO8516040884339
  57 X-BANK-SWIFT-NUMBER:DNBANOKKXXX
  58 </pre></p>
  59
  60 <p>The X-BANK-ACCOUNT-NUMBER field was proposed in a stackoverflow
  61 answer regarding
  62 <a href="http://stackoverflow.com/questions/10045664/storing-bank-account-in-vcard-file">how
  63 to put bank account information into a vCard</a>.  For payments in
  64 Norway, either X-INVOICE-KID (payment ID) or X-INVOICE-MSG could be
  65 used to pass on information to the seller when paying the invoice.</p>
  66
  67 <p>The complete vCard could look like this:</p>
  68
  69 <p><pre>
  70 BEGIN:VCARD
  71 VERSION:2.1
  72 ORG:SLX Debian Labs Foundation
  73 ADR;WORK:;;Gunnar Schjelderups vei 29D;OSLO;;0485;Norway
  74 URL;WORK:http://www.linuxiskolen.no/slxdebianlabs/
  75 EMAIL;PREF;INTERNET:sdl-styret@rt.nuug.no
  76 REV:20130212T095000Z
  77 X-INVOICE-NUMBER:1
  78 X-INVOICE-AMOUNT:NOK1000.00
  79 X-INVOICE-MSG:Donation to Debian Edu
  80 X-BANK-ACCOUNT-NUMBER:16040884339
  81 X-BANK-IBAN-NUMBER:NO8516040884339
  82 X-BANK-SWIFT-NUMBER:DNBANOKKXXX
  83 END:VCARD
  84 </pre></p>
  85
  86 <p>The resulting QR code created using
  87 <a href="http://fukuchi.org/works/qrencode/">qrencode</a> would look
  88 like this, and should be readable (and thus checkable) by any smart
  89 phone, or for example the <a href="http://zbar.sourceforge.net/">zbar
  90 bar code reader</a> and feed right into the approval and accounting
  91 system.</p>
  92
  93 <p><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-02-12-qr-invoice.png"></p>
  94
  95 <p>The extension fields will most likely not show up in any normal
  96 vCard reader, so those parts would have to go directly into a system
  97 handling invoices.  I am a bit unsure how vCards without name parts
  98 are handled, but a simple test indicate that this work just fine.</p>
  99
 100 <p><strong>Update 2013-02-12 11:30</strong>: Added KID to the proposal
 101 based on feedback from Sturle Sunde.</p>
 102 </div>
 103
 104       <div class="tags">Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard</a>.</div>
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