IAB’s Digital Advertising Invoice API Specifications

June 10, 2025

IAB Digital Advertising Invoice API Specifications

Automating Invoicing in Digital Advertising: Streamline operations. Eliminate manual processes. Accelerate invoice processing.

Now Open for Public Comment

Despite the digital transformation of media and marketing, invoicing remains one of the last strongholds of outdated, manual workflows. From emailed PDFs to snail-mailed paper bills, the financial operations underpinning digital advertising still rely on slow, error-prone processes that create unnecessary friction, delays, and reconciliation headaches.

IAB’s Digital Advertising Invoice API Specifications aim to change that.

Developed in collaboration with Mediaocean—with Mediaocean’s Prisma specs serving as a foundational blueprint—these guidelines provide an API-first framework to modernize how invoices and related documentation are exchanged. By aligning on common data structures and protocols, the Seller Invoice API and companion File Upload API automate routine tasks, reduce human error, and help speed up payment processing while improving transparency across publishers, platforms, and buyers.

These specifications are now open for public comment until August 11, 2025.

What’s Included

The Digital Advertising Invoice API Specifications defines two complementary APIs:

Seller Invoice API – A standardized way to submit invoice data from Sellers to Buyers for reconciliation and payment.
File Upload API – A structured method for uploading supporting documentation (e.g., invoice PDFs, proofs of delivery, service confirmations).

These APIs can be implemented separately or together, depending on the Buyer’s system architecture.

Why This Matters

The current invoicing process in digital advertising is slow, inconsistent, and often opaque:

No Acknowledgment of Receipt: Invoices are frequently sent via email with no confirmation of receipt—some may even land in spam folders.
Mismatch with Buyer Systems: Submitted invoices often fail to match the buyer’s Purchase Order or Insertion Order, resulting in rejections or manual clarification loops.
Lengthy Reconciliation Time: Finance or media teams are forced to review and reconcile details line by line, consuming hours of back-and-forth communication.
Delayed Payments: These inefficiencies directly impact cash flow for sellers and delay critical budget cycles for buyers.
Inconsistent Formats and Fields: Invoices are submitted in a wide range of formats with inconsistent data fields, making them difficult to parse and automate.
Manual Uploads and Document Handling: The absence of standardized document submission processes leads to delays, missing files, and audit challenges.
Lack of Documentation Standards: Without uniform rules for supporting materials, incomplete records and disputes become common.

Meanwhile, traditional media channels like TV and radio already leverage EDIs to streamline these processes. Digital deserves the same.

It’s time to bring automation and accountability to the invoicing process. These guidelines are the industry’s step toward a faster, cleaner, and smarter future.

Key Benefits for the Ecosystem

Designed for both Buyers and Sellers, these guidelines offer a scalable path to modernize financial workflows across the digital advertising value chain. Sellers, including publishers and platforms, should work closely with their Invoice System providers to implement these APIs.

For Sellers:

Receive confirmation that invoices have been successfully delivered and received.
Reduce the risk of invoice rejections due to formatting or field mismatches.
Accelerate payment timelines by minimizing manual processing delays.
Upload supporting documentation (e.g., PDFs, proof of performance) in a consistent, traceable way.
Improve audit-readiness and streamline dispute resolution with standardized submissions.
Future-proof financial operations across display, video, audio, CTV, gaming, and emerging formats.

For Buyers:

Automate ingestion of invoice data into internal systems for faster reconciliation.
Eliminate manual entry, PDF parsing, and unnecessary administrative back-and-forth.
Improve data consistency and accuracy with standardized formats and validation rules.
Speed up approvals and streamline budget management cycles.
Increase transparency into invoice status and supporting documentation.
Strengthen vendor accountability through clear structure and tracking.

Who Should Use This

These guidelines are designed for:

Sellers: Publishers, media owners, platforms, measurement vendors.
Buyers: Agencies and advertisers who receive and process invoices.
Invoice System Providers: Technology platforms that support financial data workflows.

What Happens Next

The draft guidelines are open for review through August 11, 2025. We welcome comments from across the ecosystem—publishers, agencies, platforms, tech vendors, and financial operations teams.

Following the comment period, IAB will incorporate feedback and finalize the standards for release in October 2025.

Download the Guidelines & Submit Feedback

Download Digital Advertising Invoice API Specifications

Submit comments to [email protected]

Feedback may include:

Questions or suggestions related to technical specifications or API structure
Recommendations for field-level definitions, formatting, or naming conventions
Comments on compatibility with existing systems or integration challenges
Proposals for future enhancements or use cases
Clarifications on terminology, processes, or roles

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

Who are these APIs intended for?
These specifications are primarily intended for financial systems that generate invoices on behalf of media companies, publishers, and ad tech platforms—so they can build directly to the API structure and ensure consistent, automated invoice submission.

They are also designed for any buyer’s media planning/buying platform or financial system that processes submitted invoices to build to these specifications for ingestion and integrate the data into their internal reconciliation platforms.

We also strongly recommend that buyers evangelize the adoption of these specifications to their vendors—including publishers, media companies, ad tech platforms, and others—to ensure consistency, efficiency, and automation across the ecosystem.

What is the Seller Invoice API?
The Seller Invoice API is designed to standardize and streamline invoicing across the digital advertising ecosystem by addressing both the structural integrity of invoice data and the technical aspects necessary for integration between Seller and Buyer Invoice Systems. To achieve this, the API organizes invoice data into clearly defined categories that align with how financial and order-related information is typically structured within media buying workflows.

What is the File Upload API?
This complementary API allows Sellers to upload supporting documents (e.g., invoice PDFs, proof of performance) that can be associated with the invoice data submitted via the Seller Invoice API.

Do both APIs need to be implemented?
Not necessarily. Buyer Invoice Systems may support the Seller Invoice API and File Upload API as two separate endpoints or integrate them into a single solution, depending on their internal architecture. While it is highly recommended to implement both APIs to enable full automation and document traceability, the Seller Invoice API is required at minimum to ensure consistent, machine-readable invoice submission.

What media types are supported?
The guidelines are designed to support all digital formats, including display, video, audio, CTV, programmatic, and gaming.

How does this improve operations?
By replacing PDFs and manual uploads with standardized API submissions, these guidelines enable automation, reduce error rates, and accelerate payment timelines.

Is Mediaocean’s Prisma required to use this?
No. While the guidelines are informed by Prisma’s structure, they have been adapted to be system-agnostic and can be implemented across any invoice or financial system.

How long is the comment period open?
The guidelines are open for public comment from June 10 through August 11, 2025.

How can I provide feedback?
You can email comments or suggestions to [email protected]. All feedback will be reviewed and considered before final publication.

About This Initiative

This work was made possible through the collaboration of Mediaocean, who contributed their Prisma API specifications to serve as the foundation for a system-agnostic industry standard. The IAB team adapted these specs to ensure broad compatibility across platforms.