I'm in this space in Germany, where such ideas are always taken to their logical extremes.<p>The current push towards creating some kind of standard for electronic invoices (which would allow for a standardized data package to be transformed into QR) is called ZUGFeRD.<p><a href="http://www.ferd-net.de/front_content.php?idcat=231" rel="nofollow">http://www.ferd-net.de/front_content.php?idcat=231</a>
The Zip(?!?) Containing the specification can be found here:<p><a href="http://www.awv-net.de/updates/zugferd/zugferd10.zip" rel="nofollow">http://www.awv-net.de/updates/zugferd/zugferd10.zip</a><p>This is a push towards adding data to the PDF Metadata that would allow for digitally reading of that electronic invoice by financial systems.<p>The current problem, from my reading, is that there is not enough players that see a positive ROI for implementing this standard on a wide scale on systems where it would make sense.
In Czech republic, QR codes that encode payment details for invoices are pretty common. It uses format called SPAYD for encoding of data which is variation of vCard formatting (as proposed in the begining of this article). Idea is that the same data in this format could also be transfered directly, but that is not so common, probably because there also is widely supported national standard for XML representation of entire invoices.<p>As for paperlessness: I routinely pay my cellphone bills by scanning said QR code from computer screen.
Maybe the first usage of QR codes that actually makes sense to me. People don't want to scan codes to go to urls, but they do want reliable ways take messy human-reable data and put it into software. I hope more uses like this come up.<p>QR codes were originally invented for inventory tracking. This is just an extension of that.
Why JSON?<p>QR can store binary data. Something like BSON would make a lot more sense, given the tiny amount of storage in a QR code. Even ASN.1 seems more appropriate than the silly data->ASCII->ASCII-structured-format->binary encoding that's going on here, and admittedly in a lot of other transport formats too.
A german banking app already tried to do something similar [0], but used the QR code to encode an URL containing all data instead. It seems a bit more efficient.<p>But FWIW, it never got popular. I guess you can tell by the design of the website.<p>[0] <a href="http://www.bezahlcode.de" rel="nofollow">http://www.bezahlcode.de</a> (In German only)<p>Edit: It is actually not encoding all data of the invoice, but only the bank details needed for the transfer.
It seems like a big step in the wrong direction. Sending invoices on paper should become a thing of the past. But even if you are sending invoices digitally, then choosing a common format would be the first problem. There are already several existing formats, from Edifact to XML based Oagis, with no winner in sight.<p>Rest assured that these petty JSON, vCard or the like ideas have little chance to work in real life, specifically if you need to compress invoices into the space limitations of QR codes... Real life B2B invoices are much more demanding.<p>When it comes to payment information, that is much simpler to solve. You don't even need to QR encode that, relatively simple forms with human readable numbers can be read by modern smartphone banking apps. I have two different installed (two different Swedish banks), works with most of the invoices I get home. The few that still come on paper, that is.
This is really cool.
However adoption will be a really challenging issue. When you end up having to upgrade your pos to print these qr codes (with little incentive) you could just end up switching to a square-esque system instead.<p>I think the Json format is cool. Qr codes as a representation should be one way of sharing it.
In Bolivia, starting this year, all the electronically printed invoices have to include an QR code that contains the necessary information for tax filling.<p>Having one of the worst tax system in the world I'm surprised that somebody had the idea to implement this mechanism.
I throught I read this is this discouraged. The QR code amount can differ from what is printed as text. It can yhen be used to scam a customer that does not pay attention as well as make it legally unclear what the balance due really is.