For buyers
Your rules. Your records. Your choice of platform.
A buying organisation that works in SIGNET’s terms can change systems without rebuilding its supplier records, its contracts or its audit trail.
What changes
| Today | With a shared standard |
|---|---|
| Every buyer collects the same supplier facts again, in its own format. | The supplier presents credentials once. You check them against your own policy. |
| A decision is reconstructed afterwards from emails and logs. | A decision is recorded when it is made. It must give its reasons, and can cite the policies applied and any human approval. |
| An agent works inside one vendor’s product, under that vendor’s controls. | An agent works under a mandate you grant, within limits you set, whoever built it. |
| Systems are joined pair by pair. | Each system maps once to a shared model that already maps to OCDS, Peppol BIS and EN 16931. |
| When you leave a platform, your history stays behind. | Your records are yours, in an open format. |
The right-hand column describes what SIGNET models. What you meet in practice depends on the platforms you use.
Regulation
Several jurisdictions now ask for structured, machine-readable procurement and invoicing data, among them the UK under the Procurement Act 2023 and the EU under its VAT in the Digital Age reforms.
SIGNET’s invoice maps to EN 16931 and converts to Peppol BIS Billing 3.0, and that mapping is tested on every change. Whether an organisation complies with a law is for the relevant authority to determine. It is not a property of a data model.
Where to start
- See a decision recorded: run the agent demonstration.
- Ask your platforms whether they accept or emit SIGNET documents.
- Use the model internally, as the shared vocabulary between your own systems.
- Declare adoption.