DEPLOYMENT OF e-INVOICE IN CROATIA Zvonimir Vanjak, Vedran Mornar Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing,University of Zagreb, Unska 3, Zagreb, Croatia zvonimir.vanjak@fer.hr, vedran.mornar@fer.hr Ivan Magdalenić Faculty of Organization and Informatics, University of Zagreb, Varaždin, Croatia ivan.magdalenic@foi.hr Keywords: e-Invoice, e-Business, ebXML, Web services. Abstract: Deployment of e-Invoice infrastructure promises great savings in business transactions costs. But, due to slow transition from socialist economy, Croatia has just begun planning deployment of e-Invoice infrastructure in accordance with recently released national strategy for development of e-Business. Unfortunately, existence of globally competing standards makes decision making much harder. Technical sophistication of ebXML standard hasn't prevailed in struggle for global dominance with much broadly implemented technology of web services. Some compromise will therefore be necessary. Paper presents overview of different standards considered as candidates for deployment of e-Invoice infrastructure in Croatia, as well as details regarding particularities of Croatia's legal and business environment. 1 INTRODUCTION Landscape for doing business has changed dramatically in the last decade, thanks to advances in information technology, coupled with big expansion of available network bandwidth. Although EDI (Electronic Data Interchange) systems have been around for decades (Hayes, 2002), gains from their introduction were realized mostly by large enterprises because of the economies of scale EDI required in order to get return on investment. EDI was introduced over value-added networks (VANs), which served as the common communication method but were expensive, with an initial cost of about US$ 250,000 for a mainframe installation and subsequent fees as high as US$ 0.70 per transaction (Albrecht et al, 2005). Because of this high demand on ICT investments, small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) that form the backbone of developed world economies have hesitated with adoption of EDI (Banerjee and Golhar, 1994), but explosive growth of Internet as cheap and widely available information exchange platform has given them affordable alternative. Emergence of XML and Web Services standards and their fast global adoption has certainly helped in that regard. From Clipper and dBase to Java and .NET, software development industry has come a long way. Ease of developing simple business applications with the use of modern integrated development environments (Microsoft Visual Studio, Eclipse, IBM WebSphere) has put e- Commerce definitively within reach for SMEs. Unfortunately, fundamental problem has remained the same – how to enable secure and semantically meaningful communication between different information systems. XML as a standard certainly defines „how“ to construct a valid XML document, but it doesn't say (nor it is its purpose) „what“ to put in XML schema that will represent some business information. Problem is similar with the set of specifications related to the technology of Web Services. They define basic infrastructure for message exchange, but there are multitude of issues regarding security and service discovery that have to be agreed between parties before message exchange can take place. E-Invoice, as the most used electronic document (dubbed as „queen of commercial documents“) provides a case in point. There are literally hundreds of different definitions for XML schema representing e-Invoice in the world today and this was, and still is, one of the major stumbling blocks 348