I am writing a software which sells certain service to it’s user. I am aware of hundreds of different invoicing tools around – Freshbooks, Invocie machine, Xero, SortMyBooks are just to name a few. They all have an API but integrating with each is so much work.
Is there any protocol or indicative to create a universal data exchange protocol, which would allow user to specify invoicing system of their choice on my software and have two product communicate seamlessly without prior knowledge of each-other existence?
Of course this issue goes beyond invoicing. How to connect time reporting tool with thousand of project-tracking portals? How to exchange task between Getflow and Taskify?
p.s. I’m not asking on “Webapps” because it’s clearly more focused on the user-side of web apps.
There are several standard EDI formats for invoicing, including (but not limited to) EDIFACT’s INVOIC message, ANSI X12’s 810 message, as well as more proprietary XML formats such as VISA’s