Introduction
If you have a company and you need to collect all the invoices (e.g. PDF) from different websites and services for accounting reasons, that may take a lot of time. It's especially time consuming if you have many recurrent invoices (e.g. monthly invoices from many different services).
Downloading the invoices (e.g. PDF) from all the websites takes a lot of time. Some websites send the invoices by email, some websites don't and everyone does it in a different way.
I propose a simple protocol to collect the invoices automatically.
Proposed Solution
Let's say that company Alpha is a customer of company Beta. Sometimes Beta needs to send a PDF invoice to Alpha.
Alpha logs in to the dashboard of the service provider Beta and in the billing section adds a URL like:
https://example.com/collect/invoices/LONG_RANDOM_TOKEN
Then Beta can send a normal HTTP POST request with the PDF file (or any other format) whenever generates a new invoice (beside other methods like sending the PDF by email, which can coexist).
Alpha uses the normal HTTP status codes for a semantic response.
Alpha gives a URL with a different LONG_RANDOM_TOKEN to each authorized service, so that they can be sure about the origin of the request.
Privacy & Security Considerations
No considerable privacy or security concerns are expected, but we welcome community feedback.