e-PRIOR opens e-invoicing portal for Small and Medium Enterprises (SME)

The European Directorate-General for Informatics (DIGIT) announced that its open-source e-procurement platform Open e-PRIOR will soon include a web portal for e-invoicing.

This should allow Small and Medium Enterprises (SME) and individuals to also submit electronic invoices to their e-procurement customers. In fact, the first e-invoice has already been sent to the European Commission late 2010.

Is the European Commission distorting the brittle EU e-invoicing arena already?

The goal of this latest development is to offer to the public administrations in the participating Member States a full invoicing solution in addition to the already existing e-procurement solution, covering all of their suppliers:

• not only big companies connecting their own back-office systems to Open e-PRIOR installed at the public administration,
• but also SME and ordinary people, who will have the possibility to switch to e-invoicing without additional cost investment.

To cut it short: suppose you are a EU Member States and you don’t already have an B2G e-invoicing or e-procurement system, the Open e-Prior should do the task.

To cut it even shorter: the European commission is competing with European based electronic invoicing and procurement providers with a a product requires no “additional cost investment”. Distorting the brittle EU e-invoicing arena they trying to create towards 2020! What is going here?

e-Prior: exchanging structured e-procurement documents

Let’s shed some more light on this Open e-Prior project. Where did it come from and what is its scope?

• Open e-PRIOR is developed, financed and deployed by the European Commission under the IDABC programme.
• Open e-Prior was initiated by Directorate-General for Internal Market (DG-MARKT) and Directorate-General for Informatics (DIGIT) of the European Commission.
• Open e-Prior allows for the exchange of structured e-procurement documents between the European Commission and its suppliers.
• It is claimed that Open e-PRIOR provides an opportunity for reusability of an open-source solution that has already been implemented at the Commission and which provides a secure platform for document exchange.
• It also said that this is an opportunity for sharing practical experiences and lessons learnt with the aim of accelerating uptake of e-procurement (and now also: electronic invoicing) across Member States.