> why do you care what my real name is

Because the billing department verifies bills before paying them, and needs to know who to ask about the bill?

That's an internal matter. The supplier needs to include the customer's order number anyway or no one in the company will know how to deal with the invoice. That number will be linked to the person who raised the order.

What if you mistype the order number, or forget to provide it? Or when an employee makes a small order that they can just pay immediately with a corporate credit card without first getting approval? Or when a customer pays for something with their personal card and gets reimbursed later by the company? It just makes life a lot easier for everyone involved when the name of the person who made the order is printed on the invoice.

And if people really don't want the supplier to know their name, they just type "IT Procurement" into the name field.

A little suspicion I get from this post is it sounds like they have bunch of users under believable names in English, as well as many name-sounding local names that may or may not have to do with names, and they want to regularize the hell out of it to real names only, and looking into coding a machine readable data scheme to enforce a policy.

Otherwise there should be not a lot of reasons to parse and format Asian names, as suggested plenty times over here. If the incoming invoice has to go through legal checks first, the requirement shall be as codified and supplied, whether it's that the name shall be written back to front or in purple on red.

Maybe I'm just overthinking, likely I am.

If the name on a bill to my company does not match the name of the employee who ordered the product, the bill will certainly not be paid.

Do you not use POs? Much easier, allows you to approve spend if necessary and means the person paying I voices doesn't need to have an encyclopedic knowledge of your employees and keep up to date with which ones have ledt

POs seem to be very rare in Europe, people who even know what's a PO are rare.

That's far from my experience. Where in Europe and for what kind of payments?

I only use POs with my customers. I'm based in Sweden, doing work mostly in Germany, Switzerland, and England, as software sales and contract work. No one has even blinked.

In Swedish it's called a inköpsorder, but often abbreviated PO.

As an example, https://www.betydelse-definition.com/ink%C3%B6psorder has "Inköpsordern (ofta säker man PO som är kort för Purchase Order) är det viktigaste dokumentet i en inköpsverksamhet och är ett avtal mellan två parter. POn definierar vad som köps in och under vilka villkor och förutsättningar."

In English: "The purchase order (often said PO, which is short for Purchase Order) is the most important document in a purchasing operation and is an agreement between two parties. The PO defines what is bought in and under what conditions and requirements."

Looking around, here's a description of purchase order use in the UK: https://gocardless.com/guides/posts/guide-to-purchase-orders...

> Purchase orders are a helpful part of the procurement process, allowing business owners to keep track of incoming orders and to monitor stock levels. It’s a way to see exactly what money is being spent where and at what moment. In some cases, purchase orders are a basic requirement for doing business. Many government agencies and authorities insist upon PO forms being issued before they’ll agree to settle an invoice.

It wasn't hard to find similar examples for other European countries.

If you don't need a legal name, a "name" field suffices.

There are plenty of situations where you need their full legal name as per passport or other form of identification. In here it's often some form of anti-money laundering laws. The first time I came across it was for a game show where you could win money, but to take the money out of the app, the law required some legal identification.