Glossary

The definitions proposed in this glossary have been extracted from different sources available online
and adapted or shortened, if needed. The main sources used are:

http://ec.europa.eu/idabc/en/home

http://www.oecd.org/

http://www.ebusiness-watch.org/

http://en.wikipedia.org

Accounts payable (A/P): The series of files or accounts that contain the amount of money that a company
owes to suppliers but has not paid yet (a form of debt). When a company receives an invoice, this is added to
the A/P files. The A/P is a form of credit that suppliers offer to their customers by allowing them to pay for a
product or service after it has already been received.

Accounts receivable (A/R): The series of accounting transactions related to the billing of customers who owe
money to a company (a supplier) for goods and services provided to the customer. The accounts receivable is
the amount that customers owe to that company. A company generates the invoice data which are delivered to
the customer, who in turn must pay it within an established timeframe called credit or payment terms.

Authenticity: In the context of e-Business, authenticity could be described as assurance of the origin of the
data or identity of the sender. Authentication in this context is a method by which a computer recognizes and
verifies the identity of the sender of a message or file. The authentication mechanism can be based on
something that the entity knows, has, or is (e.g. a password, smart card that uses some encryption or random
number for a challenge-response scheme, or a fingerprint).

Back office system (or Back End): Computer infrastructure within an organisation which supports core
business process applications but has no external interface with customers (unlike a Web site or portal). It is
commonly referred to as an ERP system.

Data integrity: The assurance that data has not been changed, destroyed, or lost in an unauthorized or
accidental manner.

Data processing system: A system which processes data that has been captured and encoded in a format
recognizable by computer or has been created and stored by another unit of an information processing
system.

Date/Time stamp: A timestamp is a sequence of characters, denoting the date and/or time a transaction or
document is initiated or submitted to a computer system, or the time at which a transaction is logged or
archived. The practice of recording timestamps in a consistent manner along with the actual data is called
timestamping.

Days Inventories Outstanding (DIO): Refers to the number of days that a company takes to convert
inventory into sales. The lower the DIO figure, the faster inventory is being converted. Companies generally
hold as little inventory as possible, in order to decrease the working capital needs of the company.

Days Payables Outstanding (DPO): Refers to the number of days that a company takes to pay its creditors
in a given period.

Days Sales outstanding (DSO): The average number of days that a company takes to collect revenue after a
sale has been made (or average time it takes to turn receivables into cash). A low DSO number means that it
takes a company fewer days to collect its accounts receivable. A high DSO number shows that a company is
selling its product to customers on credit and taking longer to collect money.

Electronic Data Interchange (EDI): The electronic transfer of structured data (commercial and administrative) using agreed message standards, from computer to computer.

EDIFACT: Electronic Data Interchange For Administration Commerce and Transport. See UN/EDIFACT
Electronic data: the information that is entered into a data processing system typically without manual
intervention, in electronic form.

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP): A software system or, group of systems, that help to integrate and
cover all major business activities within a company, including product planning, parts purchasing, inventory
management, order tracking, human resources and finance.

e-Business: automated business processes (both intra and inter-firm) over computer mediated networks.
‘Automation’ refers to the substitution of formerly manual processes. This can be achieved by replacing the
paper-based processing of documents by electronic exchanges (machine-to-machine) but it requires the
agreement between the participants on electronic standards and processes for data exchange.

e-Catalogue: An organised descriptive list of products or services made available by suppliers to potential
buyers via the Internet.

e-Commerce: the sale or purchase of goods or services, whether between businesses, households,
individuals, governments, and other public or private organisations, conducted over computer-mediated
networks. The goods and services are ordered over those networks, but the payment and the ultimate delivery
of the goods or service may be conducted on or off-line.

e-Invoicing: the automated process of issuing, sending, receiving and processing of invoice data by electronic
means.

e-Procurement: the business-to-business, business-to-consumer or business-to-government purchase and
sale of supplies, work and services through the Internet, as well as other information and networking systems,
such as Electronic Data Interchange and Enterprise Resource Planning.

e-Remittance advice: an electronic message (whether EDI, XML, etc.) that contains the details required to
apply a payment. The file generally contains the payment total, payment date, individual invoice reference
numbers, dates, and amounts.

HyperText Markup Language (HTML): the main language used to create Web documents.

Internet Protocol (IP): The rules governing how computers on the Internet communicate and share
information.

Interoperability: The ability of information and communication technology (ICT) systems, as well as the
business processes they support, to exchange and use information.

Master data: Master data, or reference data, is information that is key to the operation of business. It may
include data about customers, products, employees, materials, suppliers, etc. The Master Data is generally
held in the core business or accounting system (sometimes referred to as the ‘back-end’ or ‘ERP’ system).

Open source software: Computer software published under a license that gives the following freedoms,
without restrictions or limitations: to use, change, and improve the software, and to redistribute it in modified or
unmodified forms. Access to the source code is a pre-condition.

Open standard: A standard adopted and maintained by a not-for-profit organisation, whose development
occurs on the basis of an open decision-making procedure available to all interested parties. It is publicly
available and the standard specification document is available either freely or at a nominal charge. It must be
permissible to all to copy, distribute and use it for no fee or at a nominal fee. The intellectual property of the
standard is made irrevocably available on a royalty-free basis.

Portable Document Format (PDF): Is a file format created by Adobe Systems in 1993 for document
exchange. PDF is used for representing two-dimensional documents in a manner independent of the
application software, hardware, and operating system. Files with a .pdf extension have been created in
another application and then translated into .pdf files so they can be viewed by anyone, regardless of platform.
Formerly a proprietary format, PDF was officially released as an open standard, and published by the
International Organization for Standardization (as ISO/IEC 32000 -1:2008)

Self-billing: An arrangement where a customer prepares VAT invoices on behalf of their VAT-registered
supplier. The customer sends a copy of the invoice to the supplier with the payment. A self-billing application
allows customers to create their own invoices, based on usage, date or other parameters, and provides an
automated payment remittance via an electronic transfer or web interface.

Structured data: Data that can be shared electronically with customers and suppliers, because the structure
and meaning of data has been standardised and usually determined by a Data model. If the same data
structures are used to store and access data then different applications can share data.

UN/CEFACT: United Nations Centre for Trade Facilitation and Electronic Business. It is now defining the next
generation of trade facilitation and e-business standards and tools.

UN/EDIFACT: United Nations rules for Electronic Data Interchange for Administration, Commerce and
Transport.

Unstructured data: Data whose meaning has to be elaborated in order to be used by a computer, such as
word processing documents, email messages, pictures, digital audio, and video.

Working capital: Represents operating liquidity available to a company. It is calculated as short-term (current)
assets minus short-term (current) liabilities. Current assets consist of: cash; short-term and marketable
securities (e.g. money market funds, government securities, etc.); inventory (including finished products
awaiting shipment, unsold completed goods, works in progress and raw materials); Accounts receivable (A/R).
Current liabilities consist of: Accounts payable (A/P), short-term loans, issued commercial paper, current
repayment obligations on long-term debt, other short-term debts.
Positive working capital ensures that a firm is able to continue its operations and that it has sufficient funds to
satisfy both maturing short-term debt and upcoming operational expenses.

XML (Extensible Markup Language): A means for writing documents that define structured data. XML
provides a basic syntax that can be used to share information between different kinds of computers, different
applications, and different organizations. Like HTML, it is written in plain text by using tags to specify a
structure for its content. Both XML and HTML contain mark-up symbols to describe the contents of a page or
file, however, whereas HTML defines how elements are displayed, XML defines what those elements contain.
An XML document can include a self-describing set of rules that identify the tags and their relationships; it
allows users to create a language tailored specifically to their needs. Many vocabularies have been developed
and a universal language has been created to provide a standard for interoperability between them (see UBL).

UBL (Universal Business Language): a format for exchanging data from one XML business language to
another. Based on ebXML Core Components, UBL is designed to provide a common language that acts as an
intermediate vocabulary so that one XML vocabulary can interoperate with another. UBL was created to
promote e-business over the Internet. Derived from the Common Business Language (CBL), which was
sponsored by the U.S. Government, UBL became an OASIS standard in 2004.