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Subject: SV: [ubl-dev] Best practice for timezones in invoices?
Hi Mikkel, I’ve got the following response on the subject from my colleague
Sören Lennartsson; Generally
I would say the sender's time zone should apply, it is an unnecessary
complication to keep track of all partner's time zones (even more so as many
suffer from temporary adjustments like summer/winter time). Dates
in commercial documents would likely have to satisfy business requirements on
two levels: -
legal requirements (e.g. auditing and tax payment - on seller's side I would
expect that authorities wish to read dates as "local"; on buyer's
side, buyer's "local" date information is added/recorded in the
process for audit purposes), and -
commercial practices/requirements (these might potentially be
negotiated; and may be even mixed - e.g. despatch time and estimated arrival
time may be expressed in local time). As your example concerns payment terms:
this is part of the commercial arrangements between seller and buyer, it is up
to them to select/define workable ones. However, some of these terms are less
appropriate because they are not 100% clear to all involved, but they seem to
be still favored for unclear reasons (possibly historic ones?). In e-commerce,
with the potential for automated processing, it becomes even more obvious
that ill-defined terms should not be used. As an example, in Sweden we have the
use of terms like "30 days after receipt of invoice" which is not
helpful to the sender's follow-up system. This is leads over to educating the
community of users, instead of mirroring the paper world. But
in a global economy "sender's time zone" may still not be
precise enough - is it the sender's time zone where the operations
took place, or where the company is officially registered (or, even, where the
outsourced invoicing service is located)? I don't know any details, but for
commercial dates there must be international commerce law governing
interpretation of such dates. /Martin Forsberg Single Face To Industry, Sweden Från: Mikkel Hippe Brun
[mailto:mhb@tradeshift.com] Hi all, Whats best practice in terms of timezones on invoices and
other business documents? Scenario: A US based company invoices a European company at 11pm EST
on April 30th. Thats actually 5am CET on May 1st in Europe. Some European
companies have payment terms stating that an invoice will be paid "at the
end of a month plus thirty days". I am assuming that it is the timezone of the sender which
counts and that you would not "normalize" the view of an invoice to
your own timezone.
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