Title: I manage expenses for my company on an AMEX card. People I work with that want to expense something over X amount come get my card, make the purchase, return the card and forward the invoice. Each invoice is a unique snowflake. Some contain data that can be scraped, others direct to you a website which may or may not be able to be scraped. Design changes break the scrapers. They may or may not support a billing email and if not, things get even more muddled.<p>The same fragility problem that REST solved remains running rampant in how businesses invoice each other.<p>What if each business allowed you to provide an end point to which they would POST when an invoice dropped, using a free and open standard? Wouldn&#x27;t this cut an accounting departments&#x27; head count down significantly?<p>The lack of adoption to take seems like the answer to my question...<p>As a SaaS business, why would I build an end point when I can sign up for recurly or similar and just auto email invoices?<p>As a small business receiving invoices, this is something that takes 20 minutes a week to type in.<p>As a medium to large business, it gets to the point where I have 50 invoice scraping scripts and am feeling the pain. I guess at this point the answer is to &quot;hiring another book keeper&quot; but it bugs me that an open standard and a simple POST would automate the whole shooting match.<p>Are other businesses doing this &quot;right&quot; in a way I&#x27;ve missed? Is there an opportunity here for software to eat a bit more of the world? Perhaps simply publish an open source standard and see if people run with it?<p>[EDIT: Tried to use less words to explain the problem]
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