UBL, CII and EDIFACT
Three public formats covered natively, to speak with every ecosystem.
Updated on May 7, 20261 min readUBLCIIEDIFACT
Beyond Factur-X, OstraOS natively generates three other public formats to adapt to your customers' demands or your historical EDI ecosystem. The choice is set at your farm level and can be overridden per customer when some impose a specific format.
Three formats, three use cases
- CII (Cross Industry Invoice): the pure XML standard defined by the United Nations for international invoice exchange. The European reference for structured B2B transmissions.
- UBL 2.1: the international XML standard, especially used on the Peppol network that federates cross-border exchange in Europe.
- EDIFACT INVOIC: the historic EDI format of large retail. Made of text segments, still widely used by food retail chains.
All these formats comply with the European EN16931 standard and are accepted by accredited dematerialization platforms. The choice depends on your customer's pipeline, not on your craft.
How to pick
If your customer is a large retail account, EDIFACT INVOIC is often requested. For cross-border European exchanges, UBL 2.1 is preferred. For the French SME standard, Factur-X remains the simplest choice.