You may be tired of scanning/printing to pdf your travel tickets or other receipts and then entering them to your employer’s travel/cost management system. What if the receipts went directly to your digital wallet — or even better — your employer’s system, in a machine-readable format? You only had to check the cost object codes and submit your expense report for approval.
We have made a prototype of a verifiable eReceipt that enables this. When you buy a product you tell the point-of-sale system or webshop your employer’s eAddress (for instance, as a QR code) and the eReceipt is delivered to your employer’s digital company wallet. From your employer’s wallet the eReceipt can be relayed to the cost management system and accounting. Take a look at the screencast video showing the process.
If you want the receipt for yourself, it can be dropped also to your personal digital wallet in your smartphone. Such a wallet could be, for instance, the upcoming suomi.fi wallet by the Finnish Digital and Population Data Services Agency. You can keep the eReceipt in your personal wallet or relay it further to your employer’s, if needed.
The eReceipt prototype has been implemented using SSI technology (Self-Sovereign Identity). The prototype follows the ARIES standard and its cloud-based ACA-Py implementation. The employer’s eAddress is a DID (Distributed identifier) that is used for searching the distributed ledger for the employer’s eReceipt reception endpoint. The eReceipt is presented as an Anoncreds credential whose semantics is based on the Peppol standard. Please note that the link to the travel/cost management system is still pending and not there in the screencast video.
The eReceipt’s structured content enables the employer to automatically process the incoming eReceipt. Its digital signature protects against tampering with the receipt contents. The eReceipt issuer’s business register data and VAT number can be further attached to the eReceipt as verifiable credentials issued by the competent authorities i.e. the national business registry and the tax authority.
The Finnish Real-Time Economy project is involved in the European EWC consortium whose Large Scale Pilot will demonstrate the transfer of electronic attribute attestations between legal person wallets, as introduced by the upcoming eIDAS regulation. The project participants will introduce an eIDAS-compliant organisation wallet with related organisational identity guaranteed by the authoritative sources. Then the organisation wallet can issue electronic attribute attestations (e.g. related to travel use case) to natural or legal person wallets and verify proofs presented by them. The project has proposed eReceipt as one of the EWC use cases.