What exactly is an invoice? Since the dawn of humanity, we've been cataloguing and counting items. See the past, present, and future of invoices as they pertain to global trade.

1. WHAT IS AN INVOICE?
A Quick Jaunt through
The History of Invoices

2. Here’s a very
brief and not at all
exhaustive stroll
through the history
of invoices.
Businesses
send half a trillion
invoices each year
to get paid.
And that’s nothing new. From the Ishango
Bone, and modernization occuring in ancient
Mesopotamia, the concept of keeping
records of exchanged goods is as old as
humans themselves.

3. Ishango
Bone
Way back in the day,
folks in what is now the
Democratic Republic of the
Congo, settled along the
shore of Lake Edward, were
using stylized bones to
keep track of...something.
It must have been really
hard to factor in dynamic
discounting with this tool.
Like most artifacts from
the Paleolithic, we have no
idea what this artifact was
actually used for over
20,000 years ago, but it
has tantalizing tally sets
laid out in columns,
including a column that
shows a set of numbers
and their doubles, leading
scientists to hypothesize
that it may have been
used as a sliding scale.
Maybe to tally up goods
exchanged? More effective
than memory, probably.

4. The Birth of
an Alphabet
It wasn’t poetry: it was invoices.
The earliest systemic writing we
know of goes back to around 3,000
BCE. The Sumerians’ successful
early economies were religious and
temple-centric. It didn’t take long for
officials to need something more
than memory to keep track of the
grain, sheep, beer, and cattle coming
or going from their warehouses.
Need an early payment solution?
You’re going to have to wait for
the clay to dry before you can
rush payment back out
the temple.
Cuneiform was born as
an accounting solution. A
pictorial script, it quickly
ballooned to over 1,000
characters to represent
everyday items. Lucky for
you, no language has kept
that many symbols in their
alphabet. Imagine trying
to make sense of those
invoices.

5. Linear B
In 1952, archaeologists
uncovered thousands of tablets
written in an undeciphered
language in Nestor’s Palace in the
ancient Mycenaean city of Pylos.
Linear B, the highly creative name
for the language, was decoded in
1953, and researchers found that
most of the tablets were receipts,
shopping lists, invoices, and other
mundane records.
The nice thing about this one
is that it’s lined. Organizing
all of your invoices in one
place with thick clay tablets
probably took up a couple of
large palace rooms, though.
The famous Pylos Tablet
Tn 996 is an invoice for
bathtubs, water flasks,
cups, watering pots, jugs,
gold vessels, and an oil
lamp. Nestor probably
bought them from an
ancient Mycenaean
Restoration Hardware
to furnish his palace.

6. Fast forward to the
bustling art scene of the
Northern renaissance
where we find that even
the psychedelic Dutch
painter Bosch relied
on invoices to get paid.
Here’s a record of a
down payment Philip
the Handsome (vain
much?), King of Castile,
paid to Bosch. The total
cost was 360 guilders
(roughly $32,000 USD)
for Bosch’s 1504 triptych,
“The Last Judgment.”
Hieronymus
Bosch and
art invoices
Despite his trippy style, or perhaps
because of it, Bosch was en vogue in
the north for combining elements of
the southern renaissance style with
northern atmospheric perspective
to tell hallucinatory biblical stories
for his patrons. The payment
records are interesting, too.
An invoice in cursive. How
quaint. With notes in the
margin. Maybe you felt like
one of Bosch’s subjects if you
were the one who had to
approve all of the invoices in
different scripts. Too bad they
didn’t have a digital solution.

7. Georgian
Funerary
Invoicing
“Ask for me tomorrow and you shall
find me a grave man.” – Mercutio,
Romeo and Juliet, (3.1.94-95).
Imagine handwriting every
invoice. In cursive. You might
not want to expand your
business too much if you have
to write out every one. And you
probably get your payment by
horse and buggy. Rejoice that
now you can process invoices
instantly with digital solutions.
Here’s another handwritten
invoice, and this time for
funeral materials in 1780.
This Georgian era funeral
was for an Eleanor Hall at
the expense of her
husband. The tragedy
here is it’s been over 300
hundred years since
Gutenberg’s printing press,
and this company’s still
not using it for invoices.
Hopefully, e-invoicing
is adopted quicker.

8. Alcohol: an ageless theme
updated for the 20th
century. 1904 to be exact.
This invoice illustrates the
design flourishes of brand
marketing. With all that
extra time from an
automated process, they
could spend it on making
their invoices look cool.
Graham
Brothers
Distillers
Here the Graham Brothers
Distillers team uses their invoice
as advertising. I’m sure the AP
pro approving this appreciated
the extra attention to detail for
the second it took to stamp this
as approved.
Is that long division? Pity the
poor professional that had to
do the math on every invoice.

9. Atari
A lot can change in 75 years.
Except the need for invoices.
This one is so much better than
cursive. But those tell-tale off-the-
line numbers identify this as a
word processing machine invoice.
And that lined out joystick purchase
probably had to be reconciled on a
paper spreadsheet.
This lucky customer
bought an Atari 810 disk
drive, the first drive for
Atari’s line of 800
computers. They even got
the sweet game, Star
Raiders. Unfortunately, it
looks like the joysticks
were out of stock. You
could probably even scan
this invoice into your
system today.

10. EDI
How very 1990s of you, 2003!
Even though this invoice is only
15 years old, it already looks
archaic. While EDI has been around
for decades, it hasn’t ushered in the
paperless office. This screenshot
of a Walmart invoice represents
the typical look of still common
ERP-driven solutions.
This brings back memories
of the 90s. Wait, people still
use this?

11. Tradeshift
Ahh, the future.
Here we have a state of the art,
highly scalable, completely digital
invoice. Look at that intuitive
sidebar menu. Impressive!
What’s that you say? This is a
Tradeshift e-invoice? It looks so
good, even the ancient Sumerians
would use it.
Dynamic discounting, digital
invoicing, instant vendor
quotes, one simple to use
platform, digital marketplace,
mobile platform: we’ve arrived.

12. With all the time
you’ll save by
automating, you’ll
be able to break
out your Atari and
log the highest score
in Star Raiders.
The future
wears shades
While paying invoices is easier than ever,
new advances such as artificial intelligence
and blockchain technology are making the
future of supply chain payments brighter
than ever. New AI tools are reshaping the
industry, making time-consuming tasks
accomplishable nearly instantaneously.
And blockchain provides a complete
transaction audit trail by utilizing
immutable and transparent transactions.

13. To learn more call +1-800-381-3585
or email sales@tradeshift.com
About Tradeshift
Tradeshift drives supply chain
innovation for the digitally connected
economy. As the leader in supply chain
payments and marketplaces, the
company helps buyers and suppliers
digitize all their trade transactions,
collaborate on every process, and
connect with any supply chain app.
More than 1.5 million companies
across 190 countries trust Tradeshift
to process over half a trillion USD in
transaction value, making it the largest
global business network for buying
and selling. Discover commerce for
all at tradeshift.com