In our post ‘The ultimate instrument to promote e-billing adoption’ we mentioned that a steep increase in de price of stamps would be THE key driver to mass scale adoption of e-invoicing, e-billing, online invoicing, supply chain, and so on.
Assessing factors affecting SME Adoption
However Marja Seppä, former research assistant at the Aalto University School of Economics, performed a research called “Electronic invoicing in SMEs: Assessing the factors affecting the adoption”.
Now, this research was available in PDF for while, but isn’t anymore. So we dug a bit deeper and were able to find a presentation on this paper.
Graphics on SME adoption of electronic invoicing
Thankfully the presentation contains at least some of the graphics we loved so much in the paper.
1. The research questions
2. The research framework
3. The SME companies and their characteristics used in the research
4. The results: SME’s e-invoicing adoption behaviour within the framework
Andy M. on 
Ronny Mattens on
Stamp prices? Most SMEs are using PDFs these days so there is no cost of stamps to consider. Unfortunately this is not eInvoicing though, since only the delivery is automated and not the processing. The chart displayed would be of interest if it included the definition of eInvoicing that was used when surveying these companies – and if more than 8 companies were included in the research of course. If on the other hand, there are companies with 2.5 employees doing end to end integrated eInvoicing, it would be interesting to know what the driver was.
Hello Mairi Hayworth,
Thank you for sharing your vision. How would you visualize e-invoicing adoption for SME’s?
P.S. only a small portion of SME’s is using e-invoicing, and part of that used PDF
P.P.S. using PDF is e-invoicing (eg new EU directive) and even PDF can be used for integrated einvoicing: http://bit.ly/pYERfD
I think it is implied (and perhaps stated in the actual paper) that this study has been done on Finnish companies. In Finland, e-invoice is by definition an XML document – sending PDF-emails is not an option, hence postage fees on paper invoices work as a catalyst.
This does not mean that PDF wouldn’t be a viable option in some countries. But in Finland, e-invoicing has developed way past this point and the study should be read in this context.