You see a lot of startups today, most in the tech space or 'business to consumer' markets. Many are creating a new service to disrupt something that is simply disorganized or out of reach to a certain market, like über, or BlackJets. The power of these businesses is that they handle transactions directly through the consumer on the credit card. Generally, they charge and track just 1 or 2 values, that is, "what the end user paid", and "what they owe the cab driver", pilot, pedicab driver, or other vendor.<p>For those of you in B2B startups, you may already know this, but for those still in B2C, I'll fill you in:<p>Handling vendor invoices can be a real pain, especially if you are trying to disrupt a truly rusting industry. My vendors still send paper invoices via mail, or, at best, PDF invoices via email.<p>However, vendor pricing data must be accurate in my systems, and the existing services are not perfect for a startup's needs. ACH can be a big risk to your cash flow, and credit cards, as Square is showing, have their inherent drawbacks. Also, OCR just isn't there yet, unless you have a form-style piece of paper, like a personal check.<p>So where does that leave startups like us, who are tracking more than just the 'Total Amount Paid' field, who want to digitize -everything- in their vendor payments for analysis?<p>My company is an information service for company's and their <i>dumpsters</i>. The product/pricing book for dumpsters is anything but simple. <i>Every</i> location has a different sized can, with various fuel surcharges, environmental fees, local government taxes, frequency of pickups, and so on. I want to track all of this, and so far, I've had to employ interns to do the data entry for us. And worst of all? There are millions of permutations of waste invoices. If I went with OCR, I'd really just be trading man-hours entering data for man-hours managing invoice templates.<p>ACH, as I said earlier, is a big risk because its -instant- ... Why do you think credit cards are so much more popular than debit cards? And even if I did ACH, I paid full price, before the full net-pay duration, and <i>still</i> lost out on the data.<p>'What about ERP Systems?!' - well thats an option, but they are massively 'clunky', and barely automate anything anyway - I'd still have to get a direct tap into my vendor's databases/ERP systems... Sounds like $ millions $ to me.<p>So I'm left with this question:<p>Why isn't there a universal API, or something similar, that companies like my own can tap into, and automagically track dozens of fields per invoice record? Get every vendor-type company to push data into the system, and BOOM - we've got an exchange.<p>If anyone wants to create that, you have my seed backing. Alternatively, if my Google skills just aren't as good as someone else's, and there is a better system than exists from what I mentioned above, please, please fill me in. Hoarding knowledge isn't cool, didn't philosophy teach you?!