Ten years of Armenia's HDM integration protocol

Two parallel streams of documents

SRC publishes (and republishes) two distinct kinds of cash-register documentation:

• User manuals — written for the seller / accountant: how to register a cash register, how to print invoices, how the WiFi module is set up, how X / Z reports are constructed. The 2013–2014 onboarding and tax-invoice manuals were Aşot Petrosyanarchive's; the 27 February 2014 WiFi-VPN setup notearchive is Gurgen Nersesyan's — his earliest known SRC HDM artefact, a year before he picked up the integration line in 2015. Later additions: the June 2017 tax-invoice user manualarchive (Anna Bouchatskaya), the February 2019 software user guide v3.0archive (no individual byline), and the March 2019 split-payment operations notearchive (Lusine Ayvazyan).
• Integration manuals — written for the developer integrating a POS / accounting / e-commerce system with a cash register. Authored by Gurgen Nersesyan from 2015 to 2022, then by «Stefan» from 2021 (the first electronic-HDM manual) and 2023 onwards.

The two streams have different audiences, different cadences, and different version conventions. They were originally published side by side on petekamutner.am, in the same «New Generation CCMs» folder under the tax-service operational documents tree — browse the archived directory on the Wayback Machine. The modern SRC HDM hub at src.am/144 hosts only the current versions today (v0.72 and v0.73 of the integration manual, the April 2026 electronic HDM manual, and a couple of legacy operations PDFs); every historical version below is accessible only via the Internet Archive.

The earliest documents (2013–2014)

• 16 August 2013 — «Acquisition, registration and de-registration of new-type cash registers»archive, authored by Aşot Petrosyan. 15 pages. The first onboarding guide in this archive — published roughly when the Cash Register Implementation Office SNCO had been operational for about a year and the market was being introduced to «new-type» registers.
• 27 May 2014 — Tax-invoice registration and management user manualarchive, authored by Aşot Petrosyan. 36 pages. The PDF's built-in title still reads «State Tax Service» even though the Tax Service had been folded into SRC five years earlier — the legacy name lingered inside subdivision-level documents.

The integration-protocol release timeline (2015–2025)

Every release we recovered, with the date stamped into PDF metadata (not the filename, which is sometimes off by months) and the lead author as PDF-metadata author:

The earliest spec — v0.3, April 2015 — already defines the shape the protocol still uses today: TCP between cash register and POS, JSON-encoded requests and responses, 3DES encryption, the basic operator-login / receipt-print / report-print verb set. Subsequent versions added prepayment / postpayment flows, invoice forms, returns and corrections, and (for v0.7+) richer metadata. The page count grew from 17 to 37 — about 2.2× — across ten years.

Two named lead authors

This is where the metadata reveals something the regulator never publicly annotated:

• Gurgen Nersesyan authored every integration manual from 2015 through December 2022 — eight years of continuous evolution under one byline. The progression v0.3 → v0.4 → v0.5 → v0.51 → v0.6 → v0.61 → v0.7 was his.
• «Stefan» appears as PDF author for the first electronic HDM manual (12 July 2021) and then for the entire post-Nersesyan integration line — v0.71 (June 2023), v0.72 (September 2023), the November 2024 eHDM revision, the republished v0.72 (April 2025), v0.73 (April 2025), and the April 2026 eHDM. Six releases in three years, alternating between the hardware and electronic tracks.

Neither name is annotated as the author anywhere on src.am itself — both are reverse-engineered from PDF metadata fields, which any reader can re-verify with pdfinfo on the linked artefacts. We report the names here as a fact about the source, not as a claim about formal authorship or current employment.

2021: virtual HDM diverges from hardware HDM

The biggest discontinuity in this archive is the 12 July 2021 «electronic HDM» manualarchive, 22 pages, authored by Stefan and published in December 2021. This is when the virtual / software-only HDM track separated from the hardware register protocol — three years before the 25 December 2024 amendment N 1720-Լ formalised the regulatory framework around the new addressee.

The policy intent was framed even earlier — in September 2019, SRC had publicly discussed «E-commerce and virtual HDM» (covered on Hardware vs virtual cash register). The chronology is: policy framing 2019 → technical specification mid-2021 → publication December 2021 → regulatory amendment late 2024.

After 2021, two protocols coexist: the classical integration manual keeps evolving (v0.7 in 2022, v0.71 in 2023, v0.73 in 2025), and the eHDM track has its own separate manual that revised substantially — from 22 pages in December 2021 to 37 pages in November 2024 — before the current April 2026 release.

One curiosity worth flagging: the version label «v0.72» was applied to two distinct files — one published 15 September 2023 (33 pages), the other republished 1 April 2025 (34 pages). The timestamps and content hashes are different, but SRC kept the same version number. If you keep a local copy of «v0.72» and want to know whether you have the 2023 or 2025 cut, compare the file size or page count.

Why this matters for integrators

If you're building software against a cash register today, you read v0.73 (or whichever is the current published version on the SRC HDM hub). But understanding the version history is useful in three practical ways:

• Field semantics drift. A v0.61 receipt may include or omit fields that v0.7 made required. If you maintain integrations that serve receipts from older devices, knowing when each field appeared helps debugging.
• Author continuity is real. Eight years under one lead author meant a stable design vocabulary. The 2023 hand-off to a different byline is when you should expect more shape changes per release.
• Hardware-and-virtual interoperability. Since 2021 the two tracks have separate documents and could in principle drift apart; in practice they share the JSON envelope and the operator/login verbs, but only by walking both manuals in parallel can you be sure your integration handles both.

Sources

• All version PDFs above are linked through the artefact registry with their archived petekamutner.am snapshots on Internet Archive.
• The current v0.73 manual is published on the SRC HDM hub and archived as an artefactarchive.
• Author attributions come from the Author and CreationDate fields in each PDF's metadata, readable with pdfinfo. We have not corroborated them against any external source.