Universal Business Language

The Universal Business Language (UBL) is an XML-based standard created and maintained by OASIS (Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards) for electronic business documents. Think of it as a universal vocabulary for invoices, credit notes, purchase orders, and other commercial documents.

In addition, ISO/IEC 19845:2015 (which is free to download) specifies the OASIS Universal Business Language (UBL version 2.1), which "defines a generic XML interchange format for business documents that can be restricted or extended to meet the requirements of particular industries". 

Specifically, UBL provides the following three things:

  • A suite of structured business objects and their associated semantics expressed as reusable data components and common business documents
  • A library of XML schemas for reusable data components such as "Address", "Item", and "Payment", the common data elements of everyday business documents
  • A set of XML schemas for common business documents such as "Order", "Despatch Advice", and "Invoice" that are constructed from the UBL library components and can be used in generic procurement and transportation contexts.
Effectively, UBL provides the structures and semantics of the granular level "documents" that carry information that become business events and financial transactions.

ULB matters because accounting is fundamentally a language problem: every financial transaction is a story about who did what, when, and why related to a business contract. When different enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, banks, tax authorities, auditors, financial reporting frameworks, regulators; those organizations accumulate "reconciliation debt".  A universal language like UBL eliminates that friction. It ensures that the meaning of a business event and the transaction they spawn is preserved as it moves from operational systems to the general ledger, to financial statements, and ultimately to regulators and stakeholders.

Peppol is an international digital procurement and e‑invoicing network designed to let businesses and governments exchange standardized electronic UBL documents such as invoices, sales orders, purchase orders, and credit notes.  Peppol is a trusted, interoperable infrastructure. For more information see Peppol.org. The Open Peppol GitHub repository.

There are some similarities between Peppol and UBL and HL7's FHIR.

There is also crossover between XBRL Global Ledger and UBL. Ultimately, information from UBL documents becomes REA business events and then the basis for a financial transaction.

Here is a Peppol UBL invoice. Here is a Peppol document validator.  In this example of an invoice you can see the terms used to describe the invoice and the structure of the invoice.

Here is an image of the workflow related to the processing of an order. Note that orders can be changed and that an order can also be canceled. This will give you an idea of the important role of the Universal Business Language:


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