The words, without the sales pitch.

A

Accounts payable (AP)

The money a company owes its suppliers for goods and services already received, and the process of recording, approving and paying those supplier invoices. In an accounting firm, AP work for clients is mostly supplier-invoice entry: the part Invoreg automates.

AP automation

Software that captures supplier invoices, extracts their data, routes them for approval and posts them to the accounting system with as little typing as possible. The measure that matters is how many invoices reach the ledger without a human re-keying anything.

Approval workflow

A rule that stops an invoice from being posted or paid until named people have signed it off. Invoreg supports up to three approval levels per client organisation; nothing registers in the accounting software until every configured level has approved.

Audit trail

A log of who changed what, when, and from which value to which. For supplier invoices this covers every edit to every field between upload and registration, so an auditor or a client can reconstruct how a booking came to be.

Autoscan (Zoho Books)

Zoho Books' built-in document scanning. It reads date, amount, merchant and line details from an uploaded receipt or bill and pre-fills a transaction. Each Zoho organisation has a monthly scan allowance by plan, with a paid 50-scan add-on that expires after three months.

See also Zoho Books

B

B2B / B2G / B2C

Business-to-business, business-to-government and business-to-consumer. E-invoicing mandates usually start with B2G (suppliers to public bodies), then extend to B2B, and rarely cover B2C.

Bank reconciliation

Matching every line on a bank statement to the invoice, bill, fee or transfer it belongs to, so the balance in the books agrees with the bank. The slow cases are one payment that settles several invoices, part payments, bank charges and references that say nothing. Invoreg reads the statement, even a PDF or a scan, matches payments to invoices and flags the lines it is unsure about.

C

Client organisation

In Invoreg, one client company inside a firm's workspace, with its own mailbox, coding rules, approvers, labels and connector. A firm runs any number of client organisations side by side and users only see the ones they are assigned to.

Clearance model

An e-invoicing regime where the invoice must be sent to, or validated by, the tax authority's platform before (or as) it reaches the customer. Italy's SDI and Poland's KSeF are clearance systems.

See also Post-audit model

Coding

Assigning an account code, tax rate and, where used, a project or cost centre to each line of an invoice so it lands in the right place in the ledger. Line-level coding is what makes management accounts reliable; header-only capture leaves it to be done by hand.

Continuous transaction controls (CTC)

The umbrella term for tax authorities receiving transaction data in or near real time: clearance e-invoicing, real-time reporting and digital reporting requirements are all CTCs.

Credit note

A document a supplier issues to reduce or cancel an earlier invoice. It needs to be matched to the original invoice and booked as a negative amount; invoice-capture tools must recognise it as a credit note rather than a bill.

D

Data processing agreement (DPA)

The contract that Article 28 of the GDPR requires between a controller (the firm or its client) and a processor (a software vendor handling personal data on their behalf). It fixes what the processor may do with the data, where, and with which sub-processors.

Digital reporting requirements (DRR)

Under ViDA, the obligation from 1 July 2030 to report intra-EU B2B transactions to the tax authority electronically, transaction by transaction, replacing the periodic EC Sales List. Suppliers report within 10 days of issuing the e-invoice; customers within 5 days of receiving it.

See also vida

Duplicate detection

Checking a new document against everything already captured or already booked so the same invoice is not paid twice. Invoreg links duplicates to the original and refuses to register them; documents already in the accounting software are matched too.

E

EC Sales List (ESL)

The periodic return of intra-EU B2B supplies that VAT-registered businesses file today. ViDA replaces it with transaction-level digital reporting from July 2030.

E-invoice

An invoice issued, sent and received in a structured electronic format that software can read without OCR: typically XML following EN 16931. A PDF sent by email is not an e-invoice in the legal sense, even though it is electronic.

EN 16931

The European standard for the semantic data model of an electronic invoice. Directive 2014/55/EU requires public bodies to accept EN 16931 invoices, and ViDA makes the standard the default for cross-border e-invoices.

Extraction (AI vs OCR)

OCR turns pixels into characters; extraction turns those characters into fields (vendor, date, total, each line). Older tools use OCR plus templates per supplier; AI extraction reads any layout, including phone photos and upside-down scans, and reports how confident it is.

F

Factur-X / ZUGFeRD

A hybrid invoice format used in France (Factur-X) and Germany (ZUGFeRD): a PDF that humans can read with an embedded EN 16931 XML that software can read. Common in the German-speaking market.

G

GDPR

The EU General Data Protection Regulation. Supplier invoices contain personal data (names, addresses, sometimes bank details of sole traders), so where they are processed, by whom and under which agreement is a GDPR question, not just an IT one.

H

Header-level capture

Reading only the top of an invoice: supplier, date, number, net, VAT and total. Enough to record a liability, not enough to code the invoice by line or to prepare structured data for digital reporting.

See also Line-level capture

I

Intra-Community supply / acquisition

A sale of goods from a VAT-registered business in one EU member state to one in another (supply), and the corresponding purchase (acquisition). These are the transactions ViDA's digital reporting covers first.

K

KSeF

Poland's national e-invoicing system (Krajowy System e-Faktur). Mandatory B2B e-invoicing through KSeF starts in 2026 for large taxpayers, with smaller businesses following.

L

Line-level capture

Reading every line of an invoice: code, description, quantity, unit price, VAT rate and line total, not just the header. It is what allows per-line account coding, project allocation and the structured data future reporting will need.

See also Header-level capture

M

Mailbox capture

Giving each client organisation its own email address so suppliers, clients and staff can forward invoices straight into the queue. Attachments are split, read and parked for review without anyone downloading a file.

Multi-entity / multi-org

Software that runs several legal entities in one workspace with shared users and separate books. For accounting firms this is the difference between logging into forty client systems and working from one queue.

O

OCR

Optical character recognition: converting an image of text into machine-readable characters. It is the first step of invoice capture, not the whole job; see Extraction.

P

Peppol

A network and set of standards for exchanging e-invoices and other business documents between access points. Malta, Ireland, the Netherlands, Belgium and many others use Peppol BIS Billing 3.0 for public-sector invoicing.

Post-audit model

An e-invoicing regime where invoices are exchanged directly between supplier and customer and the tax authority checks them afterwards. Most of the EU worked this way until clearance and real-time reporting arrived.

See also Clearance model

Purchase order (PO) matching

Comparing an invoice to the purchase order (two-way) and the goods receipt (three-way) before approving it. Common in industry; most small-business clients of accounting firms do not raise purchase orders, so approvals replace matching.

R

Real-time reporting

Sending invoice data to the tax authority at or shortly after issue, as Hungary and Spain (SII) do. Malta has said its rollout will combine e-invoicing with real-time reporting.

Reverse charge

A VAT mechanism where the customer, not the supplier, accounts for the VAT, typically on cross-border B2B services and some domestic supplies. Reverse-charge transactions fall under ViDA's digital reporting.

S

SAF-T

Standard Audit File for Tax: an OECD-defined file format for handing accounting data to a tax authority. Portugal, Poland, Norway, Lithuania and Romania use variants; it is a reporting format, not an invoicing one.

SDI (Sistema di Interscambio)

Italy's clearance platform, mandatory for B2B e-invoicing since 2019 and the model many later mandates cite. Every invoice passes through SDI before it reaches the customer.

SII (Suministro Inmediato de Información)

Spain's near-real-time VAT ledger reporting for larger businesses, in force since 2017: invoice data is sent to the tax agency within four days of issue.

Sub-processor

A third party that a processor uses to handle personal data on the controller's behalf, such as a cloud host or an AI model provider. A DPA must list them and where they process data.

T

Three-way match

Approving an invoice only when it agrees with the purchase order and the goods-received note. See Purchase order matching.

Touchless processing rate

The share of invoices that go from receipt to the ledger with no human edits. The honest number for an accounting firm is lower than vendor marketing suggests, because a reviewer should still look; the goal is to remove typing, not judgement.

V

VeriFactu

Spain's requirement for certified invoicing software that produces tamper-evident invoice records and can send them to the tax agency; it applies to businesses outside SII, phased in over 2026–2027 after a postponement.

ViDA (VAT in the Digital Age)

The EU package adopted in March 2025 that, among other things, lets member states mandate domestic e-invoicing without a derogation, makes structured e-invoices and digital reporting mandatory for intra-EU B2B transactions from 1 July 2030, and harmonises national systems by 1 January 2035.

See also Digital reporting requirements (DRR)

VAT gap

The difference between the VAT a country should collect and what it actually collects. The latest European Commission VAT gap study puts Malta's at 24.2 % against an EU average of 9.5 %, which is why Malta says it will move on e-invoicing early.

X

XRechnung

Germany's national EN 16931 profile for e-invoices to public bodies, and one of the accepted formats under Germany's B2B e-invoicing rules that began phasing in from 2025.

Z

Zoho Books

Zoho's cloud accounting system, widely used by accounting firms in Malta, Ireland, Cyprus and the Netherlands. Invoreg's first connector posts bills into Zoho Books through its API, creating vendors and items where needed.

See also Autoscan (Zoho Books)

Missing a term? Tell us and we will add it. See also the country-by-country e-invoicing timelines.