It is an easy to understand overview of the legal requirements for electronic invoicing and archiving for all the EU countries and selected countries outside EU.

What does this white paper has to offer you?

1. The White Paper explains the current legal situation in an easy to understand, simple and clear manner and provides an overview of the respective national requirements for sending and receiving electronic invoices throughout all EU countries and selected countries worldwide.
2. It includes detailed information about legal requirements in countries like Switzerland, Mexico, United States and others. These countries are relevant for most international companies for setting up electronic invoicing processing.Within selected countries thereof the use of electronic invoices is mandatory and has been stipulated by the governmental authority.
3. In addition, the specific national requirements for electronic archiving are laid out for all countries.
4. The AuthentiDate White Paper provides each reader, even those without special prior knowledge, with a simple guide for implementing electronic invoicing and archiving.

   This enables virtually anyone implementing quickly and pragmatically country-specific requirements when exchanging electronic invoices throughout the European Union and beyond. For example, special compliance requirements such as the use of a qualified time stamp for electronic invoices in Italy and Hungary are portrayed.

5. The extent to which the individual European countries have already converted the new EU Council Directive 2010/45/EU regarding electronic invoicing into country-specific laws is also comprehensively explained. I.e. Germany most recently converted the directive into national law through a tax simplification act.

Two versions. Premium and free of charge

The White Paper, including an overview of the legal situation in the European Union and selected countries worldwide, is available freely in English language at no charge.

The free version includes an overview of the requirements of each EU country and selected countries worldwide and may be downloaded www.authentidate.de/en and www.signamus.com.

An extended, detailed – over hundred pages – version may be ordered anytime by submitting the order form, which is located in the free version.

This article is from E-invoicing Platform. Read the original post at: FREE DOWNLOAD: Compliance Requirements in the EU, and beyond.

Christopher Elmore wrote The 8 Pitfalls of Accounts Payable Automation to make the transition to the future less risky. Between 2000 and 2006 I personally managed 79 AP Automation projects. With that experience he was able to identify 8 areas where his clients had trouble. Some did better than others, but if the 8 areas were not addressed they all were in trouble.

So read the book… Take the advice… Give some love to Christopher….and And stay out of the PIT!

The eight pitfalls of Accounts Payable automation

There are 8 sections of The 8 Pitfalls of Accounts to your  company’s specific needs:

1. Your Current Environment
   Understanding who your company is  and where you are – will keep you out of the pit
2. The Selection
   Making assumptions with service providers  will put you in the pit.
3. The Organization
   Doing your homework before the project will keep you out of the pit.
4. The Project
   Perception is not reality, keeping the project organized and in control will keep you out of the pit.
5. The Vendors
   Poor or misdirected communication can put you in the pit!
6. The Training And Going Live
   Keeping training in the proper  perspective will keep you out of the pit
7. The Evaluation
   AP Automation is not an event! In order to stay out of the pit you need to be, continually improving.
8. The Future
   Having an idea of what is to come will keep you out of the pit.

This article is from E-invoicing Platform. Read the original post at: Book: The 8 Pitfalls of Accounts Payable Automation.

That is, according to the representatives of the paper industry: TwoSides. So what is their argument? This is:

“The message that “going paperless saves trees” is misleading because it links paper to deforestation, i.e. the permanent removal of forest. In the United States, however, the paper industry encourages and depends on sustainable forest management practices that regenerate billions of trees annually.”

They are right you know!

In fact, they are right. The paper industry does need sustainable forest management to survive. Even with recycling of old paper, they still need trees for proper paper production. And they actually succeeded in maintaining and boosting sustainability, because:

• The US and Canadian forest has actually grown over the last 100 years
• The European forestation grows with four times the square size of London each year.

Now, who would be willing to claim that these achievements were possible because of the uptake of e-invoicing?

How green is your solution?

There are several types of green approaches:

• Brown disguised as green
  - You send your customers digital images or PDF documents that can’t be copied from.
  - Your customers have to print it and manually enter the data in their financial software.
  - You fine them if they don’t swallow the consequences of your changed behaviour
  - RESULT: unhappy customers
• Glaring green
  - You send them e-invoices in a digital format that allows them to copy the contents
  - You fine them if they don’t swallow the consequences of your changed behaviour
  - RESULT: not so happy customers
• Green
  - You send them e-invoices in structured format: UBL or in a similar data format
  - They can get the invoices, after logging in on an online portal
  - RESULT: indifferent customers
• Bright happy green:
  - You have a self service portal where customers can enter their preferences
  - You send them e-invoices in the preferred data format.
  - You also send them the invoice in a WYSIWIG format
  - RESULT: jackpot: recurring customers that experience fast savings too.

So next time your here someone speak of going green, try to figure out what shade of green it actually is. Because the consequences can be huge.

This article is from E-invoicing Platform. Read the original post at: The claim that going paperless saves trees is misleading [OPINION].

That is why we love infographics like this and this one. But also video’s that delivers the message accross the world can really make our day.

E-invoicing – the rest is history

In a tweet from Vincent Wouters, a Dutch Exec from iCreative, mentioned a video from Basware, that lets you experience the power of electronic in under 30 seconds.

Hold on to your hats, because here it comes:

This article is from E-invoicing Platform. Read the original post at: E-invoicing explained in under 30 seconds [VIDEO].

By cooperating we (The E-invoicing Platform and sharedserviceslink.com) want to help facilitate the adoption of e-invoicing in Europe.

Now the very elegant Susie West, founder of sharedserviceslink.com, wrote a post on the 10 top Key Performance Indicators – KPI’s-  in Purchase to Pay. Aka: things you should pay attention to.

Susies’s top 10 Key Performance Indicators

So what are these top 10 KPI’s that Susie is talking about? Here they come (The whole story is downloadable in PDF after registration via the post we mentioned above) :

This article is from E-invoicing Platform. Read the original post at: Susie West’s top 10 KPIs in purchase to pay [LIST].

The new tools are: surveys, legal documents, video’s and 5 new ROI calculators.

So take a look at the list, head over to the E-invoicing Toolbox, create your selection and download the tools you need. And best of all. It is free!

Documents

1. Tax-compliant global electronic invoice lifecycle management
   TrustWeaver, Whitepaper, 2011
   
2. Explanatory notes on VAT invoicing rules relating to Council Directive 2010/45/EU
   European Commission, document, 2011
3. GS1 Standards: EANCOM and Simple Invoice 2.0.2
   GS1, standards

Survey

1. Global Survey on Barriers to Next-Generation Billing + Global Survey on E-Billing Adoption
   BillingViews, Survey, 2011
2. Global Trends in Automated Data Capture in AP
   The Institute of Financial Operations, Survey, 2011

Video

1. Components of an electronic invoice
   PaySimple, video, 2011
   
2. Module for OpenERP to add Electronic Invoice through Web Services (WSFEv1) in Argentina
   Software, open source, 2011
   
3. Argentina’s e-invoicing requirements, part 1
   Kevin Benedict + Crossgate, video-interview, 2011

Calculators

1. AP/AR Calculator [Warning you have to leave your contact details]
   Corcentric
   
2. AP ROI Calculator [A must try]
   ReadSoft
3. Purchase to Pay ROI Calculator [A must try]
   Basware
   
4. Invoice Automation ROI Calculator [A must try]
   Basware
   
5. Bruno Koch extensive calculator (XLS) [Warning: German language]
   WKA + Billentis [Bruno Koch]

This article is from E-invoicing Platform. Read the original post at: 5 ROI Calculators + 9 other great free new tools added to the E-invoicing Toolbox.

After reading this through, what do you think: how much/little has changed since 2006?

The Power of Electronic Invoice Presentment and Payment

In recent decades, companies of all shapes and sizes have focused significant effort on improving the efficiency and effectiveness of their accounts payable (A/P) organization. Yet most finance executives remain unsatisfied with the current levels of correction work, manual processing, filing and matching activities still required within their organizations. As a result, A/P is poised for a significant transformation.

While ERP systems and EDI have made A/P more efficient over the years, they have not done enough to help companies improve performance by reducing paper handling, eliminating errors at the source and enabling low-cost, external connectivity with all suppliers. A/P, it seems, has reached a productivity plateau. But a breakthrough solution has emerged to address this issue: Electronic Invoice, Payment and Presentment (EIPP). And many top performing organizations are embracing it to reach new levels of A/P efficiencies and savings.

The Opportunity

Research suggests that the average organization is losing $15 million per year for every $1 billion in spend from inefficient A/P processes. Transaction costs, lost early payment discounts, and billing errors drive the savings that are possible. Figure 2, below, outlines the dollars that are at stake.

Figure 1: The EIPP Savings Opportunity

EIPP enables A/P organizations to capture much of these savings by leveraging and improving processes, systems, initiatives, investments and capabilities that are already in place.

A New Approach

EIPP is a powerful approach to A/P designed to create a paperless, fully automated process. With EIPP, suppliers can interact with buyers more quickly and cost effectively than ever before. Through a set of integrated capabilities, suppliers can connect with buyers and receive timely, hassle-free payments as source documents are electronically matched.

Suppliers like EIPP because it isn’t a burden for them to use, facilitates rapid payment, and generates fewer error situations that are expensive to research and resolve. EIPP also can significantly reduce the cost of compliance-related efforts. To understand the types of results that are possible with EIPP, consider the case of a global telecommunications provider, who was able to capture 95% of invoices electronically after a 10 week deployment.

The implementation reduced paper invoice volume by 60%, and cut error rates by over 50%, enabling the finance organization to redeploy A/P personnel (while also improving supplier satisfaction).

So how does EIPP work? Distilled to its core, EIPP comprises four specific solution elements:

Element 1: Capture

The Capture element of EIPP is focused on transforming the paper invoice receiving process and connecting with suppliers. Not all suppliers will want to handle the invoice creation and management process electronically. But the key to EIPP success lies in maximizing supplier participation. So in moving to an automated process, it is important for companies to remain flexible and maintain the ability to flip a PO, convert an invoice and upload an Excel file to accommodate suppliers with varying electronic capabilities. Continuing to accepting paper and incorporating an invoice conversion component for invoice management can also fuel higher adoption rates.

Element 2: Match

The Match aspect of EIPP incorporates contract terms and automates the exception management process by enabling field level, four-way matching. Four-way matching (where an item-level match extends back to the contract) is critical to capturing discounts and reducing error rates. EIPP matching capabilities are highly flexible and configurable based on an organization’s structure and needs, down to the item level. In addition, essential to successful automation and matching is general ledger integration and auto-reconciliation to reduce staff involvement, enabling resources to focus on pressing issues rather than managing paper.

Element 3: Manage

The Manage feature of EIPP focuses on automated routing to accelerate the approval process within an organization. EIPP can dramatically reduce the time spent by A/P personnel managing suppliers by enabling suppliers to track invoice and payment status. At the same time, these types of self-service capabilities can help improve the overall sales and account management process for suppliers, inviting favorable treatment in future discussions and negotiations.

Element 4: Pay

The Pay capabilities within EIPP create a predictable outflow of capital, giving financial executives exacting control over when they chose to pay suppliers. By tightly coupling with an ERP system and financial institution, companies can fine tune invoice payments based on business needs (e.g., reducing costs through taking advantage of early payment discounts). Payment capabilities accommodate multiple payment formats as well as supplier self-service capabilities to enable visibility throughout the process. In addition, EIPP solutions can include capabilities that allow the sourcing of discounts from suppliers in return for early payment.

EIPP: Fact versus Fiction

Without question, EIPP can help A/P organizations take their performance and efficiency to the next level. But identifying and working with the right partner is absolutely essential to success. But there is a lot of misinformation in the market that can lead those considering an EIPP solution to make less-than-optimal business decisions. Perhaps the most widespread myth is the notion that scanning is e-invoicing.

The truth is that scanning only begins to scratch the surface of invoice automation, marginally improving the review and authorization of invoices. Another EIPP fable is that matching is a cure-all. The reality is that basic exception management capability has been a part of A/P processes for over two decades, but has been limited by a lack of internal and external connectivity.

This has led to severe automation limitations such as the ability to match line item level detail. But perhaps the most egregious fallacy in the market is that payment automation is the core of EIPP ROI. In fact, some providers confuse payment automation with having a complete EIPP solution. In the market today, a handful of EIPP providers try to link ROI to concentrated dynamic discounting by connecting a few large suppliers and ignoring the rest. Unfortunately, this approach fails to address compliance and the costs of paper processing.

When these fictions are seen for what they are, the actual truths about EIPP are relatively straightforward. First, supplier enablement is difficult and complex, requiring expertise and economics of scale that few providers can deliver. Unfortunately, a number of companies have faced challenges with supplier enablement in the past and are likely to bury the challenging memories of such initiatives when it comes to EIPP. This is a mistake, and one that organizations can avoid by working with an expert provider who has a proven track record of rapid and cost-effective large-scale supplier enablement initiatives, and the economies of scale to enable low-cost supplier enablement. Second, companies must choose solutions that enable both low and high volume suppliers in order for their efforts to be worthwhile. A solution that delivers maximum payback must take into account high volume suppliers, accommodating existing one-off connections as well as lower volume suppliers through a common network. And third, EIPP must accommodate small, paper-bound suppliers. A disproportionate volume of invoice errors, disputes and costs originate from such suppliers – and every company depends on them. So any solution must address their needs, or the A/P efficiencies that EIPP brings will be severely limited.

Finding the Right Solution

When evaluating and EIPP solution, companies should ensure that it:

• Eliminates (not automates) errors at the source
• Permits suppliers of all sizes to easily and inexpensively connect
• Dramatically reduces the quantity of paper handled, stored and matched
• Improves supplier interactions
• Matches purchase orders, receipts and invoices to contracts
• Accommodates varying degrees of supplier sophistication
• Allows 100 percent capture of invoice volume
• Reduces compliance costs
• Provides earlier visibility into cash requirements
• Removes latency in invoice and payment processing
• Reduces the volume of supplier inquiries
• Offers multi-lingual, multi-currency capabilities
• Provides global, localized support for your company and its suppliers

Above all, companies must look for a partner that can provide a complete solution that focuses on the entire set of business processes necessary to ensure compliance and control. Without question, an EIPP suite should go beyond simple invoice automation, and should eliminate as much paper as possible in the A/P process. This is especially critical to improving performance as paper is the root of high handling costs, error rates, and low discount capture. A solid EIPP solution must possess the ability to handle the “last run” of paper-dependent suppliers (i.e., those that prefer not to do business electronically).

The right EIPP solution will be flexible based on individual needs and circumstances. For example, it should available in both installed and on-demand software models, and help walk-through which model makes the most sense. And the right EIPP partner should be able to help finance and procurement functions rethink what world class A/P should be. With the right EIPP solution and partner, companies can become leaders in the function by addressing core areas for improvement and delivering returns that can become the foundation of future A/P initiatives.

Making the Choice to Invest in EIPP

While the right solution and partner is absolutely critical to enabling EIPP results and maximizing returns, without the commitment to prioritize such efforts, companies will continue to leave opportunity on the table.

Regardless of organizational maturity, existing A/P performance levels, or level of technology sophistication or commitment, EIPP is a one-way ticket to fundamentally improving an ancient business role – getting suppliers paid. Many top performing companies have already realized this, making the decision to prioritize EIPP as a top finance and procurement initiative. What are you waiting for?

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This article is from E-invoicing Platform. Read the original post at: Increase Productivity. Not Paper: The Power of Electronic Invoice Presentment and Payment (EIPP).

But there are more sources on e-invoicing and AP automation (in random order): SpendMatters, Billentis, E-invoice Gateway and the E-business Guide.

We didn’t mention them in our previous post as they are ‘less dynamic’ then the ones we mentioned before.

We know there are loads of other websites out there, but in these two posts we focus on sites with kind of a portal approach.

SpendMatters

Just as passionately as Peter Loughlin from Purchasing, Jason Busch manages SpendMatters.

Jason writes good content. In fact his content was so good that we thought we could use it on our website some years ago. However we forgot to give him the credits like we do now. For that we were (and are, Jason) very sorry.

Billentis

Two words: Bruno Koch.

EU: CEN E-invoice Gateway

Instigated by the CEN E-invoicing Workshop, the E-invoice Gateway was intended to serve as an independent platform for electronic invoicing in de European community.

They are currently looking for new ways to exploit this website as we learned from their Request for Information.

EU: E-business Guide

Founded by Anna Bjärkerud, the European E-businessguide deals with e-invoicing, e-procurement, purchase-to-pay, and Order-to-Cash.

So, did we forget a source? Just let us know.

This article is from E-invoicing Platform. Read the original post at: 4 more websites with e-invoicing and AP automation content.

Both the E-invoicing Toolbox and E-invoicing Checklist are designed and segmented in such a way that is very useful for organisation. So, regardless of your size and regardless of your role in the broad picture, you can build a version of the checklist and toolbox that fits your purpose. For free.

The E-invoicing Checklist: 100+ hints and tips to successfully start with electronic invoicing

The free E-invoicing Checklist provides you with a practical self assessment when issuing and processing electronic invoices, or as we point out the website:

“What are the requirements set up by your IRS? What will change as from 2013? What does an e-invoice consist of? What is a simplified invoice? Does my customer understand my e-invoice?

Create your own free E-invoicing Checklist to provide yourself with tips and answers to these and many more questions.

Start here »

The E-invoicing Toolbox: 75+ free tools to get you kick-started into electronic invoicing and AP automation

The E-invoicing Toolbox provides you with very practical tools to get kick-started into electronic invoicing.

What free e-invoicing tools are out there? What are the best tips for driving adoption? How much can I and my customers save with e-invoicing?

How to become compliant? What studies and statistics on e-invoicing are available?

Create your own free E-invoicing Toolbox and get kick-started into e-invoicing, e-billing or invoice automation.

Learn more» or Get started»

This article is from E-invoicing Platform. Read the original post at: Our free E-invoicing Toolbox and the E-invoicing Checklist.

And because e-invoicing and AP automation are very sexy hot topics we see an uptake of sites that publish content on electronic invoicing and AP Automation.

Electronic invoicing and AP automation news sites

Underneath – in random order- are some sites that we think every now and then provide news and backgrounds on electronic invoicing and AP automation.

Let us know if we forgot to mention yours.

Purchasing Insight

Passionately edited by managing editor Peter Loughlin, Purchasing Insight provides thoughts and background articles on purchase to pay, dynamic discounint, but lately most of all on: electronic invoicing.

Sitting in the divide between paper processes on the one and the benefits or electronic processess on the other hand, Peter Loughlin touches on issues to get us from paper to the power of “e”.

Sharedserviceslink.com

The talented Susie West born and raised sharedserviceslink.com from 2007 to its current state. The website contains resources, regularly updated industry news and articles, job vacancies and upcoming events.

Sharedserviceslink.com focusses on: items that are of particular interest to shared service centers. Such as electronic invoicing and AP automation.

Because of shared interest. The E-invoicing Platform and Sharedserviceslink.com decided to become partners.

The Paypers

The Paypers is the brainchild from Innopay. You know, those guys that created AcceptEmail, initiated MyDeal, and organise EPCA.

The Paypers deals with: online and mobile payments, e-invoicing, online banking, e-commerce, e-identity, cards.

Finextra / Bo Harald

Every now and then you can find information on electronic invoicing on the website of Finextra. Most of the items concerning electronic invoicing are hand crafted by Bo Harald. Bo Harald was the chair of the EU E-invoicing Expert Group and is director of TIETO.

EU: E-practice

Just like the website of Finextra, you can find information on electronic invoicing on the website of ePractice.eu. However the ePractice.eu website on only contains Europe-related information.

The Institute of Financial Operations

If you are willing to subscribe for a 15 day free trial and then pay $295 a year for e-invoicing and AP related content, then you could go to the website of IOFM.

Or you could just check out our website. We provide you with the most and latest news and backgrounds, without you having to pay for it.

15 day free trial: Institute of Finance & Management

This article is from E-invoicing Platform. Read the original post at: 7 Websites that provide e-invoicing and AP automation content as well.

In the mean time enjoy the infographic below created by SmartPay. As you can see, they compare online billing with paper billing and corresponding payment methods.

You can read their explanation here.

Thank you SmartPay

This article is from E-invoicing Platform. Read the original post at: The Battle: Paper versus Online Billing [INFOGRAPHIC].

As a response to this change Itella developed new, even more versatile solutions for both physical and electronic communication.

Facts and figures

Underneath are some facts and figures on Itella:

• Finnish Postal Service
• Business customers account for 96% of net sales, consumers 4%
• Itella helps its customers to enhance their competitiveness and run their business more successfully
• The decline in volumes continues, parcel volumes increase as online shopping grow

The Itella Field trial

In the rural area of Anttila Itella conducted a field experiment ”Living Lab”, that focused on customer centric development of new postal services.

The Living Lab was started by trying a new service concept during spring 2010. 122 households and 17 small companies participated in the trial on a voluntary basis.

• In the trial mail was delivered both in paper and electronic form
• Mail was delivered twice a week to the mailbox as usual.
• On other days mail was delivered to the post locker located by the village shop.
• Mail that was not retrieved from the locker was delivered to the mailbox twice a week.
• First and second class letters were scanned and delivered electronically to NetPosti. After scanning mail was put back to envelope and delivered in paper form.
• It was also possible to receive letters to NetPosti from selected senders without format conversion.

In December 2010 the trial was extended to digital delivery of a local newspaper

• 15 households and 49 recipients participated in the trial
• the newspaper trial lasted 6 months
• in the trial a newspaper was delivered in digital form to the Netposti electronic mailbox

The key results of the trial

After the trial ended the participants together concluded that:

• In general, diversity occurred in the needs of the participants for postal services
• Many of the participants were satisfied with getting their paper mail only twice a week to the mailbox.
• Digitizing of letters got both positive and negative feedback.
• Receiving newspaper in digital form and reading it with e-reader got really positive feedback.

Download the presentation on the Itella field trial http://www.wik.org/fileadmin/Konferenzbeitraege/2011/13th_Koenigswinter_seminar/S3_3_Rokkanen.pdf

This article is from E-invoicing Platform. Read the original post at: Electronic delivery in Finland: Conclusions from a field experiment.

We received a video by b-process over b-process. Take a look and discover why Ariba decided to buy b-process. Enjoy.

This article is from E-invoicing Platform. Read the original post at: Discover why b-process is so good [VIDEO].

This article is from E-invoicing Platform. Read the original post at: Liaison Technologies Video’s [PICS].

This list post is with courtesy of Basware, that created an e-book that outlines 7 golden rules that can help you transition to Accounts Payable Automation. We ran through them and came up with these 6 rules:

Download the Basware e-book

This article is from E-invoicing Platform. Read the original post at: 6 golden rules to switch to AP automation.

Itella Information share key learnings of a recent invoicing study that was carried out on over 14,000 consumers and decision makers of companies’ invoice processes in 16 different European countries.

The main target of this research was to examine the present state, future plans and prerequisites of electronic invoicing in these countries. This approach covered the main types of invoicing, from paper to different electronic channels, such as email, Internet banking and direct transfer to the recipient’s invoice processing system.

This key learnings will help you to assess and benchmark your current solutions against some of the most efficient in the industry.

Read the entire survey here

This article is from E-invoicing Platform. Read the original post at: Itella survey about invoicing in 16 European countries.

B2BE was so kind to give us a case study. Underneath is a summary. You can download the entire case study here.

About Visy

Visy started 1948 in Melbourne, Australia and has grown to one of the world’s largest privately owned packaging, paper and recycling companies. Visy employs around 5600 people operating from over 100 sites and generates more than $2.3 billion in revenue.

Through its products and services Visy serves various sectors including pharmaceutical, construction, dairy, fast-moving consumer goods, automotive, and building industries in Australia, New Zealand, Asia, Europe, Africa, and the United States.

Visy’s wants to be truly sustainable. A journey of continuous improvement, learning and adaptation success that depends on carefully balancing economic, environmental and social factors.

Visy’s purchase to pay challenge

Visy faced a number of issues in managing incoming invoices within the company’s accounts payable department:

• Every month Visy receives around 35,000 Purchase Order, financial invoices and statements.
• These documents come from more than 10,000 vendors and partners
• Visy receives these documents in hardcopy, facsimile or email attachment.
• The invoice information all had to be manually processed and delivered into a customised workflow approval system called IXOS.
• A staff of 32 people was responsible for this labour intensive task
• Within IXOS the authorisation and archiving of invoices takes place before accounts payable information is migrated to Visy’s back office system SAP.

The Solution

Visy decided to select B2BE for its accounts payable automation, because:

• B2BE had already proved itself as being the partner ‘who could, through past achievements, meet the desired outcome’.
• B2BE lived up to Visy’s requirements
• B2BE’s outsourcing model meant no upfront investment costs and that proved to be a very attractive ROI model for Visy.

Consisting of the following B2BE products: B2BE Transaction Delivery Network and B2BE Document Digitization Service. A closer look at the chosen combination of products reveals that:

• Within the B2BE solution for Visy all scanned accounts payable documents received by email, facsimile and hard copy are transmitted to the B2BE server.
• Subsequently B2BE executes a number of added value services for Visy.
• Through the deployment of the B2BE Document Digitization Services Invoices and Statements are digitised according to the key fields required to enable the upload into the Visy IXOS and ultimately the Visy SAP system for processing based on the supplier terms which also meet local tax authority requirements.
• Furthermore, validation is done on invoice type, vendor, site contact name and duplication in order to eliminate (data) errors.
• In the next step all invoices and statements are converted into an electronic format, placed into directories based on document type for further processing into Visy’s system.

B2BE also provide a range of business intelligent reporting to enable Visy to pro-actively manage the flow of data and documents between the Visy and B2BE environments and which provide error notifications and reporting to manage exception handling based on the pre-defined business validation rules B2BE applies on Visy’s behalf.

The Result

Through the use of the B2BE solutions for the accounts payable document automation project Visy realised positive results through cost reductions and business processes efficiencies. Through these results accounts payable personnel could be redeployed within the organisation to perform more add­ed value tasks.

The specific results:

• The costs for Invoice and Statement handling and management within accounts payable were reduced over 80%.
• Increased efficiencies led to faster document handling process.
• The time for document indexing was reduced to a maximum 24 hours after document receipt.
• Almost full elimination of data entry errors: keying of wrong amounts, invoice numbers, tax details and so on.
• Elimination of duplicate invoices processing.
• Vendors are made more accountable through early error detection via the B2BE validation processes, reducing work effort.
• Increased level of data accuracy.

Next steps

The next steps for Visy will be to start exchanging documents with a growing group of suppliers by EDI instead of e-mail, fax or hard copy. In this way the process can be completely automated on both ends in the supply chain so that not only Visy, but also their suppliers and partners can benefit from future cost reductions and business process improvement.

To find out more about B2BE and how they can help your organisation please visit B2BE or e-mail au.info@b2be.com

This article is from E-invoicing Platform. Read the original post at: Visy selects B2BE for purchase to pay automation [CASE STUDY].

ABB purchase-to-pay automation

ABB selected Basware for purchase-to-pay automation. ABB successfully automated its invoice processing to increase efficiency and reduce costs. After implementing the purchase to automation project, it was of course time to create a webinar that looks at the goals, challenges and results of the project.

So, Nigel Chapman, Change Management Facilitator at ABB, shares his experience and practical advice in a webinar, and provides practical steps to reduce project risk and attain faster ROI.

Items discussed in the ABB Purchase to pay webinar

In the webinar, Nigel Chapman discusses this project and provides insight into the global programme ABB adopted:

• How to successfully reap the best results from its P2P automation programme
• Manage change regionally in line with the global enterprise
• Gain stakeholder interest and developed user commitment
• Achieve process centralisation and system integration
• Develope techniques for tackling non-compliance
• Determine project success
• top-five lessons and success factors from ABB’s UK regional implementation

Read the ABB story here

This article is from E-invoicing Platform. Read the original post at: Global ABB purchase-to-pay automation. Goals, challenges and results. [WEBINAR].

The result is 38 pages of statistical AP automation goodness.

Current global e-invoicing adoption at 39%?

The overall conclusion of the report is that 61% of invoices in accounts payable departments worldwide still paper-based. That is really something. Why, you want to know?

Because that automatically has as consequence that 39% of the invoices in accounts payable departments worldwide are: electronic invoices. 

Just imagine this: 39 out of every 100 inbound invoices are electronic invoices. That can only mean that the e-invoicing adoption is going a lot faster than we’ve thought.

Wait, there is more.

But, how representative is the IFO survey on AP Automation actually?

Here comes bad part. The survey had only 551 respondents. Nearly 80% of the respondents were from North America -based companies. These respondents looked at the AP automation within several global business sectors and healthcare respondents made up 18,3% of the survey.

That makes it hard to substantiate the overall conclusion on both paper invoices and electronic invoices. Sorry.

This article is from E-invoicing Platform. Read the original post at: Are 39% of the global AP invoices, electronic invoices already?.

Kraft Foods and OB10

Kraft Foods went live with OB10 e-Invoicing in July 2010. One year on, it has enrolled thousands of suppliers and processed hundreds of thousands invoices electronically across Scandinavia, Iberia, UK, Ireland, Benelux, France, Italy and the DACH region.

Presenters

• Gabriela Stanakova: Senior Manager EBSC Projects and Continuous Improvement, Kraft Foods
• Ruud van Hilten: VP Sales EMEA & APAC, OB10

Download the webinar today

This article is from E-invoicing Platform. Read the original post at: Learn from Kraft Foods and lead your e-invoicing project to success.

Global electronic invoice compliance

Imagine your organisation to deliver services or sandwiches all over the world and afterwards send your beloved e-invoices to all your international clients. The main question then becomes: how can you be 100% certain that your e-invoices comply with the fiscal and trade law requirement in your country and that of your clients?

Absolute certainty in e-invoicing compliance?

You can’t. Because 100% certainty doesn’t exist. However services like those of Trustweaver can get close to absolute levels of certainty. And maybe it is good to know that Trustweaver powers quite a few Billing Service Providers that provide cross border electronic invoicing and purchase to pay automation.

E-invoicing requirements in your country?

Now you could dig through Trustweaver’s entire whitepaper. Like we did. But you could also skip the first 62 pages and go directly to page 63 onwards of the Annex, called the ‘country status overview’. To us that was the best part. It contains a list of 59 countries and the way they treat electronic invoicing. With nifty slider images.

Electronic invoicing requirement in EU countries

• Austria
• Belgium
• Germany
• France
• Netherlands
• Finland
• Sweden
• Denmark
• United Kingdom
• Ireland
• Spain
• Portugal
• Italy
• Romania
• Bulgaria
• Poland
• Lithuania
• Latvia
• Estonia
• Czech Republic
• Slovak Republic
• Luxembourg
• Greece
• Cyprus
• Hungary
• Slovenia

P.S: As from 1-1-2013 this list should be combined into just one item: the EU. Due to the upcoming harmonisation and simplification spelled out in the latest EU Directive.

E-invoicing requirements in other EU countries on e-invoicing

• Russian Federation
• Switzerland
• Norway
• Serbia
• Croatia
• Montenegro
• Ukraine
• Turkey

E-invoicing requirements in North America

• USA
• Canada
• Mexico

E-invoicing requirements in South America

• Brazil
• Chile
• Argentina (not available)

E-invoicing requirements in Asia

• Japan
• Malaysia
• Singapore
• South Korea
• Thailand
• China
• Hong Kong Special Administrative Region
• Taiwan
• United Arab Emirates
• Pakistan
• Australia
• New Zealand
• India
• Israel
• Philippines

E-invoicing requirements in Africa

• South Africa
• Morocco
• Tunisia
• Egypt

Download Trustweaver’s White Paper here

Or Download it in our E-invoicing Toolbox with even more handy tools

This article is from E-invoicing Platform. Read the original post at: Global e-invoicing, what are the requirements in your country?.

AuthentiDate International AG, established specialist for international electronic invoicing processes, has issued an up-to-date, comprehensive White Paper on the legal conditions regarding the exchange of electronic invoices in Europe.

The White Paper explains the current legal situation in an easy to understand, simple and clear manner and provides an overview of the respective national requirements for sending and receiving electronic invoices throughout all EU countries. In addition, the specific national requirements for electronic archiving are laid out for all countries.

The White Paper provides each reader, even those without special prior knowledge, with a simple guide for implementing electronic invoicing and archiving. This enables virtually anyone implementing quickly and pragmatically country-specific requirements when exchanging electronic invoices within EU countries and internationally. For example, special compliance requirements such as the use of a qualified time stamp for electronic invoices in Italy and Hungary are portrayed.

The extent to which the individual European countries have already converted the new EU Council Directive 2010/45/EU regarding electronic invoicing into country-specific laws is also comprehensively explained. This was recently implemented in Germany by means of the tax simplification law.

Companies, exchanging electronic invoices internationally, may also obtain appropriate information on other countries outside Europe upon request. This also includes explanation of individual country specific requirements, such as electronic invoicing in Israel, Switzerland and Latin America.

The White Paper with an overview of the legal situation in the European Union is available in English language

AuthentiDate International AG

This article is from E-invoicing Platform. Read the original post at: eInvoicing White Paper: fulfill compliance requirements internationally.

Responses

The new ad campaign created quite some arousel, like on DigitalTrends.com and of course on Twitter. Like this tweet:

“A refrigerator has never been hacked.”

This is how an announcer begins one of two new 30-second spots called “Hacked” which are part of USPS’ latest campaign to save itself from doom.

The other ad assures viewers that with USPS, important information won’t disappear with a click. Safe and secure are the central words repeated prominently in the two ads.

Comment form USPS

“We’re not trying to be Luddites here. We’re not trying to say technology is bad. But the predictions of how fast customers would leave us were overstated,” according to Joyce Carrier Carrier also pointed out that market research shows that people feels secure about their paper mail. $145 million was spent in 2010 on print, television and online advertising.

Ailing USPS – 10USD billion los in 2011

Tthe United States Postal Service is ailing—and it’s mostly thanks to e-mail:
- mail volume has been down by more than 43 billion in the past five years,
- mail volume has declined by almost 50 percent in the past 10 years.
- a 1 percent decline in overall mail volume, according to Carrier, means a loss of $300 million.
- USPS will announce a loss of close to $10 billion this year.

This article is from E-invoicing Platform. Read the original post at: New US Postal Service campaign promotes paper invoices.

For those who don’t know Jason Busch, Spend Matters states that he is regarded as one of the leading technology pundits and thought leaders in the trade, procurement and operations worlds.

Spend Matters on electronic invoicing

Every now and then SpendMatters sparks the e-invoicing domain with interesting contributions, like his infamous e-invoicing rant. Other publications include:

• Examining the Reasons Electronic Invoicing Will Truly Cross the Proverbial Adoption Chasm
• Bay Fishing vs. Ocean Trolling — Banks Ignoring E-Invoicing, or Wanting a Larger Receivables Fish?
• Will Big Buyers and Accounts Payable (AP) Organizations Embrace Free E-Invoicing?

E-Invoicing Comes of Age – History, Solution Features, Technology Elements

The latest contribution of Jason Busch is a 14 page paper called E-Invoicing Comes of Age – History, Solution Features, Technology Elements, and More! The paper, sponsored by Verian Technologies, Basware, Coupa, Rearden Commerce and OB10, consists of:

• Page 2 : Abstract
• Page 2 : PART 1 – Framing the P2P and invoice automation challenge
• Page 3 : The road to electronic invoicing maturity
• Page 4 : How did we get here? The briefest and liveliest history of AP written to date
• Page 5 : PART 2 – Plumbing Electronic Invoicing – Including the pipes
• Page 6 : Electronic Invoicing – a technical component overview
• Page 10: PART 3 – Maturity models and building the business case
• Page 10: Building the business case – take time to do it right
• Page 12: Concluding recommendations

You can get your free copy of the paper here, provided you leave a lot of your credentials behind.

This article is from E-invoicing Platform. Read the original post at: E-invoicing Comes of Age, a Spend Matters paper.

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

This article is from E-invoicing Platform. Read the original post at: SME e-invoicing adoption visualized.

This post is transposed from Oriol Bausà’s original post: http://blog.invinet.org/?p=951

Billentis’ Bruno Koch managed to build bridges between Europe and America this time, organizing a well-balanced EXPP conference with speakers of both sides of the Atlantic. We had the opportunity to know how they are implementing electronic invoicing on both continents. It was very interesting to see the results in accordance with the policies that have been established in recent years.

Latin America
In Latin America, the main catalyst for the deployment of the electronic invoice is the tax fraud control. The laws of some Latin American countries have made it possible for the electronic invoice to reach a market penetration level of up to 90% and growing in a fast pace during recent years.

Service providers in Latin America assist in thousands of monthly transactions and the growth is exponential. This has led some European providers attaching themselves to these markets by introducing their services and products.

Europe
In contrast, the main force behind the deployment of electronic billing in Europe is not the tax control, it is the competitiveness of enterprises. Becoming more agile and being able to improve their processes and efficiency have been the main challenges marking Europe for more than a decade.

With this policy, the adoption of electronic invoicing is up to the companies, which are free to choose whether a change of this type is beneficial or not. In Europe a lot of training is necessary to convince CEOs and CFOs that the change from paper processes to electronic processes is really worthwhile and offers them real benefits.

Equal treatment and digital signatures
Therefore, the principles of “equal-treatment” (equal treatment between paper invoices and electronic invoices) are still the guiding messages from the EC.Producing electronic invoices should be as simple as making paper invoices, and therefore technical barriers that could be considered an obstacle to its adoption in enterprises, should disappear.

It’s funny how some companies (especially auditing) confuse this effort to simplify the way of the adoption of electronic invoicing in Europe by eliminating the requirement for electronic signatures, with the imposition of complex controls and audits that should guarantee the traceability of business operations.

Once again the process is considered to be very complex and expensive when in fact it is not. Our interpretation of the new directive is that electronic invoices are to be audited as paper invoices. Point.

Advantages and disadvantages
Regarding the continental approaches, both have advantages and disadvantages. In Latin America electronic invoicing is getting a high level of penetration, but only for tax purposes. Much remains to be done in the field of process integration between companies. Define the processes, establish required information models (in Mexico encapsulated in Addenda) and homogenise them to provide the knowledge that every company can benefit from these electronic processes, is their next challenge.

In the European case, the lack of obligation only enables the adoption to grow by proven profit. This results in a slow take-off for electronic invoicing in the European B2B market, but in return, users are presented with some environments and tools that will greatly facilitate the digitization of its processes. Initiatives such as the CEN BII or PEPPOL are driving this change.

National standards versus interoperability
Oriol Bausà of Invinet made ??a presentation on national standards and the road to interoperability in Europe. The message of this paper is that we cannot pretend to have a single language for electronic invoicing in Europe.

There have been too many investments in national standards written in different languages, which means that in this situation, one central language does not meet the specific requirements of each country.

What we can do is build European interoperability as one builds a castle amongst all participants, taking into account the particularities of each individual. This is what the EC does with projects such as the CEN BII or pilot deployment as PEPPOL border. PEPPOL builds bridges between communities that have their own electronic billing systems, functions as the path towards interoperability in Europe and, why not, between Europe and Latin America.

Conclusions: PDF is at its peak
Bruno Koch’s conclusions at the close of the event emphasized the differences between these two approaches and pointed to trends in the market for electronic invoicing in Europe, both from the point of view of operators and from the point of view from formats to be used: In this aspect we are currently at the peak of maximum use of PDF as the format of electronic invoices tend to grow toward a greater adoption of PDF + XML invoices while invoices in EDI format are going to be stuck in the existing models.

Source: Invinet Sistemes

This article is from E-invoicing Platform. Read the original post at: EXPP Summit 2011 in Barcelona: observations.

Tax compliant e-invoicing
“One of the ways the value-added tax works is the companies are sort of duty-bound to calculate the tax and pay the right amount. But the government doesn’t always trust them. The invoice — that’s the key the VAT authority uses to audit.”
Chris Hayes, senior product marketing manager Sterling Commerce.

“In many countries around the world, you couldn’t replace a paper-based invoice with an electronic one and have that be the basis for compliance with the tax system. The situation began to change in 2001 when the European Union (EU) passed its first “dematerialization” regulations allowing e-invoicing. Adoption has been mixed. There are a number of companies that jumped on this right away. But overall, half the companies doing business in Europe have done it, and the other half have not.”
Steve Keifer, vice president of product and industry marketing at GXS

Electronic invoicing in Brazil
“The document flow is elaborate. Upon approving the initial submission, the government returns an official NF-e file to the manufacturer, and the recipient of the goods gets an email copy. The file is also converted to a human-readable, printed document that must accompany the shipment. At any point along the route, police or custom officials can ask to scan the barcode.

The government authorities use mobile devices to access the Web services. It is literally possible for a truck to be stopped on the highway. It’s hard to get around the regulations, because the government can automatically verify compliance.”
Glenn Johnson, senior vice president at Magic Software Enterprises

Electronic invoicing in Mexico
“Applicants are required to get a “folio” number from the government and file a monthly report , though this year the government made compliance easier by allowing digital signatures and real-time processing of tax stamps to attach to shipments.”
Steve Keifer, vice president of product and industry marketing at GXS

Electronic invoicing in Argentina
“Argentina is coming on strong. Argentina’s system directs companies to multiple websites that can be quirky or fail. So Crossgate’s logic defaults to contingency rules to avoid such critical errors as incomplete transactions. Unlike Brazil, Argentina doesn’t issue invoice numbers but checks if the numbers are in sequence, he said.
Jason Jones, vice president of consulting of Crossgate (now SAP)

Standardisation and integration
“We would like it if there was a standard way to interface with SAP and Oracle, and each platform is different, though most ERP systems, including lower- or middle-tier products, have direct integration to cloud services or middleware for developing it. They all have some way of allowing you to extract information in a structured file and convert it to EDI or XML. When you go down-market, it’s likely to be one option instead of three or four.”
Steve Keifer, vice president of product and industry marketing at GXS

Service providers are the way to go
“Don’t under any circumstance attempt to custom develop solutions. There are plenty of e-invoicing, e-signature and other providers who can solve the problem for you without you having to investigate the detailed rules. Scale is important, so go to a large global provider or, if you are locally focused, providers in each of the countries where you operate.”
Duncan Jones, principle analyst at Forrester Research Inc

This article is from E-invoicing Platform. Read the original post at: A global patchwork of e-invoicing regulations.

So let’s take a look at how your own country and your fellow EU Member States score on e-invoicing and e-invoicing related processes in 2010. You can play around yourselves to discover and compare what happened  in 2008 and 2009.

EDI for purchase orders
The ‘automatic exchange of business documents’ indicator refers to sending/receiving orders to/from suppliers/customers in an agreed standard format (as EDIFACT, XML, etc) which allows their automatic processing without the individual message being manually typed.

Heroes: Italy, Norway, Luxemburg
Laggards: Czech Republic, United Kingdom, Cyprus

Advanced e-invoicing
The ‘Sending or receiving of e-invoices’ indicator refers to sending/receiving invoices in an agreed standard format (as EDIFACT, XML, etc) which allows their automatic processing, without the individual message being manually typed.

Heroes: Italy, Lithuania, Norway
Laggards: Slovenia, Cyprus, Hungary

E-procurement
The ‘use of e-procument services’ indicator refers to tender proposals that have to be submitted in an e-procurement system itself and not by email.

Heroes: Ireland, Lithuania, Norway
Laggards: Slovak Republic, Turkey, Cyprus

Supply chain
Finally, the ‘electronic supply chain management’ indicator refers to sending/receiving all type of information on the supply chain (e.g. inventory levels, production plans, forecasts, progress of delivery) via computer networks or websites, but excluding manually typed e-mail messages.

Heroes: Croatia, Portugal, Belgium
Laggards: Iceland, United Kingdom, Netherlands (ouch)

The differences in adoption rates between process and between countries explain the fragmentation in e-invoicing and e-invoicing adoption. We can only hope that the EU E-invoicing Forum can create results benefitting all countries and stakeholders.

This article is from E-invoicing Platform. Read the original post at: Is your Country a Digitization Hero or Laggard?.

HTCPC Protocol
Not all RFC’s become standards. RFC2324 is one of those exemptions. But a very funny one it is. It was published on the first of April 1998 and describes the HTCPC Protocol. What? The Hyper Text Coffee Pot Control Protocol.

Quotes
You really should read through the entire RFC. To get you started we provide you with some quotes:

“This document specifies a Hyper Text Coffee Pot Control Protocol(HTCPCP), which permits the full request and responses necessary to control all devices capable of making the popular caffeinated hot beverages.”

“Commands to control a coffee pot are sent from client to coffee server using either the BREW or POST method, and a message body with Content-Type set to “application/coffee-pot-command”

“Any attempt to brew coffee with a teapot should result in the error code “418 I’m a teapot”. The resulting entity body MAY be short and stout.”

Even funnier:
It doesn’t stop here. They even created an RFC called “A Standard for the Transmission of IP Datagrams on Avian Carriers” which was even updated to “IP over Avian Carriers with Quality of Service”. Take a look and discover what it is all about :-)

This article is from E-invoicing Platform. Read the original post at: [HUMOR] Ever heard of the IETF’s RFC2324 HTCPCP protocol?.

In this series you get the answer to these questions. Every week for the next 17 (or so) weeks a question will be answered. At the end of the series you will have a self-assessment tool and be able to pinpoint actions required to meet client requirements (and some of the fiscal requirements).

1. Current EU E-invoicing basics: “How does the IRS currently approach e-invoicing?”
2. The new EU Directive: “What will be different as from 1-1-2013?”
3. Tax requirements: “What information must be part of an invoice?”
4. The simple invoice: “What is a simplified invoice? When can I start using it?”
5. Be clear and understandable: “Does my customer really understand my invoice?”
6. Payment instructions: “Does my customer know how to pay my invoice?”
7. Create your e-invoice: “What to look after when generating my e-invoice?”
8. Issuing time: “How do I engage with my customers?”
9. Receiving e-invoices: “An AR invoice has now become my AP invoice. Now what?”
10. Verify your data: “How can I verify an electronic invoice?”
11. Manage your master data: “What are master data and how do I manage them?”
12. Let’s archive: “How do I prevent myself from getting digital Alzheimer’s?”
13. Ensure controllability: “How do I stay in control?”
14. Adoption tactics: “How do I achieve massive adoption?”
15. Acquisition fraud: “Avoid paying fake invoices!”

E-invoicing Checklist

E-invoicing Toolbox

This article is from E-invoicing Platform. Read the original post at: 15 Essential E-invoicing Questions to ask Yourself.

The E-invoicing Toolbox is now officially launched. Shortly after the already successful

The toolbox is free, practical and can be put together with the 75+ latest and greatest free instruments on e-invoicing and invoice automation.

The latest, best and most practical tools
What free e-invoicing tools are out there? What are the best tips for driving adoption? How much can I and my customers save with e-invoicing? How to become compliant? What studies and statistics on e-invoicing are available?

No longer do you have to spend many precious hours on the Internet to collect tools and information, while wondering whether this is the best out there. Because, now there is the E-invoicing Toolbox. It provides all the relevant and recent resources to get you(r organisation) kick-started into electronic invoicing, online billing or invoice processing.

11 topics, 75+ instruments
The E-invoicing Toolbox provides you with over 75 of the best, latest and most practical tools out there:
-          Free (online) tools: “What free e-invoicing tools are out there?”
-          How to/DIY: “How to implement e-invoicing or e-billing all by myself?”
-          Business Case / ROI Calculators: “How much can I save and what will my ROI be? “
-          Facts and Figures: “When do my customers, suppliers and competitors adopt e-invoices”
-          Adoption Tactics: “How to achieve massive e-invoicing adoption?”
-          Video: “Want to have e-invoicing explained? Take a look at these video’s!”
-          Legal Stuff: “What legal aspects to look after when exchanging invoices.”
-          Compliance: “How to stay in control with e-invoices?”
-          Policy: “A look at (currently only) EU’s vision on e-invoicing towards 2020?
-          Standards: “UBL, CII, XML20002 and PDF, plus 80 more B2B e-invoicing standards.”
-          Tech Stuff: “Tools for techies.”

Easy target groups pre-selection or go ‘a la carte’
The website http://www.einvoicingtoolbox.com, contains some popular pre-selections based on target groups (freelancer, SME, large business, governments and service providers) and on themes (send, receive, pay and compliance). You can of course go ‘a la carte’ and select all or only the relevant topics.

The choices made are then combined into a personal custom made and free E-invoicing Toolbox that is sent to you by e-mail. The link allows you to get back to your toolbox whenever you want.

Who facilitates the E-invoicing Checklist?
The E-invoicing Toolbox is an initiative of the Dutch-based E-invoicing Trust Foundation. The E-invoicing Trust Foundation focuses on durable adoption of e-invoicing. The E-invoicing Trust Foundation currently facilitates:
-          E-invoicing Platform (also known as the EEI Platform),
-          E-invoicing Trend Map (coming soon)
-          E-invoicing Toolbox
-          E-invoicing Checklist
-          E-invoicing Newsletter
-          E-invoicing Linkedin Group

More questions?
Go to our FAQ page

This article is from E-invoicing Platform. Read the original post at: Free E-invoicing Toolbox provides 75+ helpful Tools for an E-invoicing Kick-start.

Invoice Monitor 2011

For the fourth consecutive year Dutch e-invoicing specialist Factuurwijzer, conducted the National Invoice Survey, focussing on e-invoicing, e-billing and other financial innovations. Based on the comments from almost 500 large and medium-sized enterprises, it became clear that in 2014 94% of Dutch based enterprises will use e-invoicing:

• 39% of companies already use electronic invoicing
• Another 34% expect to get started with e-invoicing within one year from now
• 21% of the companies said to schedule e-invoicing somewhere within 2012 and 2014

Comparative results

The results are in line with several other researches like the Dutch accounting survey by Twinfield and recent figures from the governmental body Statistics Netherlands. The result state 39% of the Dutch enterprises are using e-invoicing.

Beyond the tipping point

“It is fair to say that two years after e-invoicing liberalisation the Netherlands are now well beyond the e-invoicing tipping point”, says Friso de Jong Director of Factuurwijzer. He continues: “If we used this as a blueprint for European e-invoicing adoption, we could expect similar situations in other member states in or around 2015, two years after adopting the new EU directive.”

Replacing the mailman or improving processes?

Both the Factuurmonitor as well as the other surveys show that companies of different sizes experience electronic invoicing in different ways:

• Freelancers and small companies focus on the use of PDF and email for e-invoicing. They experience e-invoicing as a way to replace the mailman with a low-cost alternative that allows to add a payment incentive, says 56%-68% of the respondents.
• (Medium) large companies and public authorities focus on sending and receiving (read: exchanging) electronic invoices that can be imported into their accounting software, improving process. 31%-35% of respondents experience e-invoicing in that way.

Trends

The survey also the respondents about their attitude towards adopting other financial innovations contactless mobile payment (NFC), SEPA, e-mandates, dynamic discounting and deployin social media. On average more than half of the respondents, medium-sized and large companies in Netherlands, were not aware of these innovations. And if they were, they were to focus on these innovation around the year 2014 or later.

This article is from E-invoicing Platform. Read the original post at: Dutch enterprises massively embrace electronic invoicing.

The E-invoicing Checklist is officially launched. The E-invoicing Checklist is a free custom made self-assessment tool with more than a hundred of practical hints and tips. It helps organisations of all sorts and sizes to pinpoint actions required when sending or receiving electronic invoices. Not just the fiscal actions, but also the very essential communication actions. That way the E-invoicing Checklist supports organisation with their practical e-invoicing adoption.

15 e-invoicing essentials
The E-invoicing Checklist contains of 15 relevant topics. They provide answers to relevant questions like:

– Current EU E-invoicing basics: “How does the IRS currently approach e-invoicing?”
- The new EU Directive: “What will be different as from 1-1-2013?”
- Tax requirements: “What information must be part of an invoice?”
- The simple invoice: “What is a simplified invoice? When can I start using it?”
- Be clear and understandable: “Does my customer really understand my invoice?”
- Payment instructions: “Does my customer know how to pay my invoice?”
- Create your e-invoice: “What to look after when generating my e-invoice?”
- Issuing time: “How do I engage with my customers?”
- Receiving e-invoices: “An AR invoice has now become my AP invoice. Now what?”
- Verify your data: “How can I verify an electronic invoice?”
- Manage your master data: “What are master data and how do I manage them?”
- Let’s archive: “How do I prevent myself from getting digital Alzheimer’s?”
- Ensure controllability: “How do I stay in control?”
- Adoption tactics: “How do I achieve massive adoption?”
- Acquisition fraud: “Avoid paying fake invoices!”

Easy target group pre-selection or go ‘a la carte’
The website http://www.einvoicingchecklist.com, contains some popular pre-selections based on target groups (freelancer, SME, corporate or outsourced) or based on a theme (sending invoices,
processing inbound invoices, exchanging structured data or compliance. Or one can go ‘a la carte’ and select all or only the relevant topics.

Free and customizable
The choices made are then combined into a personal custom made and free E-invoicing Checklist, which is sent as a PDF document by e-mail.

How to assess?
Study the received E-invoicing Checklist topic after topic. Per topic, read all checklist-items chronologically. The checklist items are in orange. Many of the checklist items have an explanation. And many of the chapters have a ‘more information’ badge at the end of each section.

Per checklist-item one can rate whether your organisation does (checkmark) or does not meet (x-mark) this requirement or whether this requirement does not apply to their organisation (indent). This way, one immediately knows which requirement their organisation can/should devote attention to.

This way one can now get to work to improve the aspects of its invoicing process, collections process or even purchase-to-pay process that need attention.

Who facilitates the E-invoicing Checklist?
The E-invoicing Checklist is an initiative of the Dutch-based E-invoicing Trust Foundation. The E-invoicing Trust Foundation focuses on durable adoption of e-invoicing. The E-invoicing Trust Foundation currently facilitates:

- E-invoicing Platform (also known as the EEI Platform)
- E-invoicing Trend Map (coming soon)
- E-invoicing Toolbox
- E-invoicing Checklist
- E-invoicing Newsletter
- E-invoicing Linkedin Group

This article is from E-invoicing Platform. Read the original post at: Free E-invoicing Checklist offers 100+ e-invoicing hints an tips.

PayPal is introducing a range of e-invoicing APIs that businesses can access directly from their applications.

This article is from E-invoicing Platform. Read the original post at: PayPal makes e-invoicing play.

By: Juha Häkämies, Vice President Market Development at Basware

This article is from E-invoicing Platform. Read the original post at: E-invoicing – why it’s inconceivable that paper is superior.

We want to help near future adopters to make it as easy as possible to start the engine and make a smooth ride on the highway to e-invoicing. A lot of organisations are aware of the advantages that e-invoicing can reveal for them, but they are not well informed on the tools to prepare their bike.

Do you have any tips for free online tools, services or software or perhaps an idea to lower the threshold, please leave your comment or email to info@eeiplatform.com.

Inspiration:

- advanced AP/AR calculators, communication to suppliers/customers, software, free (online) services, mapping tools, tech stuff

- homemade (preferred) or to be found on the Internet

- free of charge

- and (when found on the Internet): without user registration

Thank you!

The EEI Platform

This article is from E-invoicing Platform. Read the original post at: What FREE tools are out there to kick start E-invoicing / E-billing?.

They came up with Grid, a programme which puts the consumer in charge of the payment handling.

The required personal en financial information that comes with a payment, credit card number and expiration date, no longer are within reach of  parties with wrong intentions.

Grid now is applicable to the Dwolla payment network, but sets a new precedent for the use of a comparable system on any payment network. The system reduces the risk of being robbed in every payment situation, such as buying shoes, ordering a coffee or purchasing  a CD.

In fact, the builders of the current system have brought about a great deal of liability for themselves and the other parties involved in a payment process: consumers and merchants. Why not change this way, as there is no compulsory payment standard?

What does Grid do?

• Provide third party developers with the tools needed to create a seamless purchasing experience in an app or an online purchase (no more entering painful credit card numbers!)
• Validate a new kind of payment network, one that doesn’t leave behind personal information.
• Serves as platform for future integration into mobile applications (Zaarly, Square, Google wallet, Mint, etc.)
• Puts consumers, not networks, in control of who can access, their payment information, and to what degree (allows users to revoke and alter third-party access to your payment network).
• Grant developers first time access to a payment network and its core technologies

It offers users the possibility to be in total control of every payment, whether it concerns managing data or the actual purchase throuhg for instance Zaarly.

This revolutionary method (access is free) offers developers to innovate and build on top of existing procedures, and the removal of payment information decreases the liability associated with plastic networks. Moreover, it is a great cost saver for businesses.

www.dwolla.com

This article is from E-invoicing Platform. Read the original post at: Dwolla-Grid: more secure than plastic payments.

The following article first appeared in Peter Whent’s blog “Small Business Syndrome”. Peter Whent is Founder and Chief Executive of Clear. You can follow his blog here: http://small-business-syndrome.blogspot.com/

Invoice scanning together with Optical Character Recognition (OCR) – digitising paper documents to you and me – is presented by many as the answer to everyone’s electronic invoicing prayers. In fact one company which I won’t name, which claims to be a leader in e-invoicing, is actively promoting it as their strategy. There are several reasons why invoice scanning is not the answer and represents only an interim solution.

The holy grail in the world of e-invoicing is that an invoice should go from creation, to delivery, to approval, to payment without a piece of paper being created. In other words machine to machine with software doing the work along the way. Not a pipe dream at all. Today we deliver hundreds of thousands of true electronic invoices a year that follow exactly this path.

Invoice scanning and OCR (in the context of invoice processing) became popular because companies couldn’t persuade enough of their suppliers to adopt a truly electronic method of submitting invoices. This meant they found themselves in no man’s land – paying for an e-invoice solution but still having to retain a small army of employees to handle paper invoices. Scanning and OCR takes the paper, scans it and uses OCR technology to lift the data off the page so that it is useful and uses it to create an electronic invoice. But here is why it is no more than an interim solution:

1.       It is at best an inaccurate process. OCR software vendors will tell you they can read characters from paper with 99% accuracy. That may be so with a simple text document in a medium sized typeface. But when it comes to small print on invoices, the reality is that it is a lot less accurate. It only needs to read one character incorrectly in the wrong place for the invoice to fail in an electronic approval process. Someone has to manage these failures and exceptions. People involved in the process? Not what was promised from “electronic invoicing”

2.       Second – OCR on its own is not enough. The next thing a well run AP department will want to do is validate an invoice before it goes into an approval process so that it doesn’t get lost within the approval process. Validation, which is an automated process, includes all those pre-flight checks before starting an electronic approval process – is there a Purchasde Order (PO) number? Does it relate to an existing PO? Is there a supplier reference? Is there a VAT number? Does the invoice add up correctly? And so on. Even the most sophisticated solutions with people checking every invoice struggle with this. Suddenly the failure rate had risen. More inaccuracies and exceptions to manage. More people involved.

Of course the net result of this is that you or your outsourced provider has to incur some real costs to bring this error rate down. Guess who ends up getting stuck with those costs? So suddenly your business plan doesn’t look so good. Where you were expecting to drive the cost of processing each invoice down below £1, human intervention has resulted in costs being much higher.

Scanning and OCR has its place. Even allowing for the absurdity of taking an electronic file, printing it out on paper as an invoice, sending the paper to your customer for them to use an expensive process to turn it back into an electronic file – it has its place. But only if you build your business case based on there being a concerted effort to migrate from scanning and OCR to real electronic invoicing. You should aim over a three year period to turn a ratio of 80% scanned and 20% electronic on its head and have 80% submitted electronically. This is all about being good at persuading your suppliers to send you electronic invoices or online invoices. That is a whole subject on its own!

To see how a good e-invoicing deployment works download a case study here which shows how Essex County Council released 20 AP staff and will save £2.5 million next year by understanding the important distinction between scanning as a means to an end versus scanning as the answer. They now process tens of thousands of real electronic invoices – those that go from creation to delivery, to approval to payment without a piece of paper being created. Invoice scanning was merely a stepping stone which helped them to get there.

This article is from E-invoicing Platform. Read the original post at: Why invoice scanning and OCR is no more than an interim solution.

Clear Connect is a ground breaking new extension to Clear. In short it allows you to use all of the great functionality of Clear but from within your own finance system or accounting software. Some of the things Clear Connect allows you to do are:

• Receive electronic invoices straight into your finance system – no more keying invoice data…
• Receive all invoices electronically in one place.
• Automate the sending of all kinds of invoices electronically from your finance system.
• See where invoices are in your customer approval process in real time.

To describe in more detail how Clear Connect can help you, we invite you to join our Web Presentation on Wednesday 25^th May at 2pm. As long as you have an Internet connection you can watch from the comfort of your desk.

Click on the following link to register: https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/596804754

We look forward to introducing you to Clear Connect

This article is from E-invoicing Platform. Read the original post at: How Clear Connect extends your finance system to automate e-invoice processing.

In 2011, it is estimated that approximately 5 million European invoice senders and 75 million recipients exchange electronic bills/invoices. Since practically all large European companies are using this new electronic process, e-Invoicing is quickly spreading among medium-sized and small companies. Therefore, market growth rates of 30-35% are expected in the coming years.

Due to increasing globalization, North American companies are being affected by the electronic process operations of their trading partners and subsidiaries inEurope andLatin America. Consequently, there is a great need for information on the use of e-Invoicing in an international environment. As an aid for companies that want to choose the best suitable solution, there is a new market report written by Bruno Koch, an independent and internationally renowned industry analyst and owner of the consulting company Billentis.

The report is intended to support invoice senders and recipients who want to replace expensive and paper-based invoice processing with electronic and automated processes. It contains the most important figures and information about the market. In addition to facts on market development and relevant initiatives (standards, laws), readers will also find qualitative assessments and details of solutions offered by more than 20 providers.

A 16-page excerpt from the report is available free of charge:
http://www.expp-summit.com/marketreport.htm

This article is from E-invoicing Platform. Read the original post at: E-Invoicing and E-Billing – From Evolution to Revolution.

The theory goes that 80% of your invoices are from 20% of your suppliers. You only need to get the biggest 20% of your suppliers on board and you can achieve 80% of your wildest dreams.  That feels like  you can achieve 80% of the results for 20% of the effort. It isn’t that easy though. It’s true that the Pareto rule does mean that you can achieve great results by concentrating on the right areas, the priority suppliers, but regrettably for lots of businesses, the 80:20 rule just doesn’t apply.

Many organisations have an extreme supplier tail. This can be for a variety or reasons but if you have a huge proportion of invoices from a very small group of suppliers but the majority of invoices are from a  large number of relatively small suppliers, your supplier adoption challenge can be massive if you intend to use electronic  invoicing. A similar problem exists if there is a very wide geographical diversity. Numerous diverse tax and legal requirements can make the implementation of e-invoicing an uphill challenge.

But it doesn’t have to be all bad news. Sure there’s challenges but the answer is to recognise that one size doesn’t fit all. You can get close to 100% electronic invoicing if you adopt a hybrid approach.

e-invoicing – the hybrid model

We can debate till we’re blue in the face whether scanning invoices or accepting pdf images is really e-invoicing. It’s irrelevant. AP automation is what we’re trying to achieve. Whether we do that by using a predefined invoice message standard or we achieve it by extracting the data from a paper invoice is immaterial.

The good news is that we don’t need to choose one approach or the other. Indeed, the hybrid approach could be the one that gets the close to 100% electronic invoicing the fastest.

Source: Purchising Insight

This article is from E-invoicing Platform. Read the original post at: e-invoicing – one size doesn’t fit all.

By Steve Keifer

2010 is an exciting time in the world of B2B integration standards for the European banking sector.  In this case, I am not referring to the continued rollout of SEPA in the EuroZone, but rather the extended reach of EBICS.  EBICS is a highly secure file transfer protocol being used in the French and German banking communities for exchange of cash management related transactions.

The name EBICS stands for Electronic Banking Internet Communications Standard (EBICS).  EBICs is the successor to an earlier standard named BCS that was used in the German banking sector from the mid-1980s until the end of 2007.  BCS refers to the Banking Communication Standard which was developed by the German Credit Committee, which is known as Zentraler Kreditausschuss Association (ZKA) in German (longer, but no doubt easier to say than Eyjafjallajokull).

BCS was originally designed to offer a standardized approach for corporate-to-bank communication.  In the early days of electronic banking many of the technology vendors were developing their own proprietary protocols in lieu of a widely adopted standard.  BCS was based upon the ISO 8571 standard commonly known as FTAM (File Transfer Access and Management).  German banks were mandated to offer BCS as a communication adoption starting in the 1990s.  The mandate along with the publicly available distribution of the specifications led to widespread adoption of BCS across German industry.  Challenges began to emerge shortly after 2000 with the popularity of the Internet as a network for business transactions.  As with all transaction types, the industry began to seek alternative IP-based protocols for electronic banking.  The ZKA responded by evolving the BCS standard into a more fully-functional, Internet based standard called EBICS.

EBICS is a transport protocol that offers secure transmission of files independent of the payload.  As a result, EBICS can be utilized to exchange a variety of banking information such as account statements; securities holdings; debit and credit payment orders.  EBICS supports the traditional SWIFT FIN/MT message classes such as the MT 103 and MT 940.  Furthermore, EBICS can be easily extended to support the new ISO 20022 XML (SWIFT MX) messages.  The EBICS protocol is based upon HTTP, but with network encryption using TLS.  Due to the nature of the financial transactions EBICS supports, high levels of security are incorporated.  EBICS also offers checkpoint/restart capability which enables the file transmission process to gracefully resume in the event of interruption (rather than having to start over).

EBICS has been offered in Germany since January 2008.  Adoption has been much quicker than other B2B messaging standards.  The success is due in part to the fact that the traditional alternative, the legacy BCS standard, will no longer be supported at the end of this year.  All of the major German banks – Deutsche, Commerzbank, Dresdner (Allianz) and HypoVereinsbank support the protocol along with the smaller, regional institutions.

The big news in 2010, however, is not just the decommissioning of BCS, but rather the adoption of EBICS within the French market.   A new version of EBICS (2.4) has been developed to meet the needs of the local French payments and banking sector.    Much like in Germany, EBICS will be replacing a legacy communications protocol called ETEBAC (Echange TElematique BAnque Clients) in France.  ETEBAC is scheduled for end-of-life in 2011, which is driving a sense of urgency for French corporate and financial institutions to migrate to new connectivity options.  EBICS is not the only option for French corporate.  Treasurers can choose to connect to their financial institutions via SWIFTNet or alternatively via a web-based portal provided by the bank itself.

ETEBAC, the French communications protocol being replaced, has a rich history much like BCS.  The original versions of ETEBAC (v1 and v2) were unidirectional in nature.  ETEBAC1 enabled corporate clients to upload a file (e.g. payment instruction) to a bank using a secure transmission over the phone network.  Conversely, ETEBAC2 offered the ability to download a file (e.g. account statement) from a bank.   The most popular version of ETEBAC was version 3, which supported bidirectional exchange of files via the TRANSPAC network.  A fourth and fifth version of the ETEBAC standards were developed but never reached the popularity of ETEBAC3.

The rollout of EBICS in France and Germany offers an interesting case study in the evolution of B2B communications standards.  In my next post I will highlight what we can learn from the new EBICS protocol.

By Steve Keifer

This article is from E-invoicing Platform. Read the original post at: EBICS – The Standard for Corporate-to-Bank Communication?.

Argentina is one of the Latin countries that put electronic invoicing into practice. Based on Government rules and regulations, there are many differences between eFactura and for instance Brazil’s Nf-e (Nota Fiscal Eletronica).

The law in Argentina obliges every company that deals with VAT related invoices to generate these documents in the electronically:

• Invoices or equivalent documents class A
• Credit notes and debit notes class A

Companies have the option to create the electronic version of the documents below:

• Invoices or equivalent documents class B
• Credit notes and debit notes class B

This fiscal program has started in 2006, and it it took the Government a great deal of time and effort to make it mandatory. The number of commercial channels and communication methods were other aspects that made the implementation take so long. Moreover, the implementation proves to be a slow growing trend as the level of validation over the XML file sent to AFIP is not high.

In order to issue an electronic invoice (eFactura), the companies must request a digital certification called Fiscal Key. Using this fiscal key, the company is an electronic issuer. Then, the company will request authorization to issue each separate invoice. This authorization is requested to AFIP (Administración Federal de Ingresos Públicos), the Government Tax Entity. An electronic certification number called CAE proves that the authorization is official. Without the CAE number applied to the invoice, it is not possible to release invoices to customers.

This CAE number can be gathered in two ways:

-          Normal: the communication method does not matter, every invoice should have one

-          Anticipated:  the company can ask for a certain number of CAE numbers according to its wish, for 15 days. After this period, the company has to file a report on how many of those numbers were really used. Optionally,they can make a request for more.

Another determining aspect when configuring a company’s scenario in eFactura is the regime. A regime determines the tax contribution model that applies to the company. Two major ones are:

• R.E.C.E. à Regime de Emissión de Comprobantes Electrónicos – http://www.afip.gob.ar/fe/#rece
  This is the most adequate model for large contributors. It is based on web services, with no limits.
• R.E.C.L. à Regime de Emissión de Comprobantes en Línea – http://www.afip.gob.ar/fe/#recl
  This modelv  is very adequate for companies with no more than 100 invoices per month.

By Alexandre Carvalho
APC Solutions

This article is from E-invoicing Platform. Read the original post at: eFactura, the Argentinian Electronic Invoice method.

It’s a statement any project implementation team in any function could make, which isn’t necessarily helpful  if you’re in the middle of automating purchase to pay (P2P) and struggling with adoption. Nigel Chapman, Change Management Facilitator at ABB, a provider of power and automation technologies, revealed how he helped to transform P2P.

Speaking on a sharedserviceslink.com webinar with Basware, he told the audience how they not only increased ABB’s purchase-order-compliant invoices from 60% to over 99% but also achieved closer relations with its suppliers and internal businesses.

It’s worth taking note of ABB’s key lessons learnt for delivering a successful automation programme:

• Be clear in your communications about why changes are happening and provide a high-level route map for your P2P journey
• Change management is key
  • Adopt a robust methodology
  • Build and maintain stakeholder engagement and communication
  • Deliver consistency in messages and actions
• Involving the supply chain management function was critical to our success
• Maintain commitment and be willing to dig deep and provide support during tough times
• Recognise that this is a journey and be prepared to work with changes that emerge as the project proceeds

Sound advice for all project managers.

If you missed the webinar, the recording of this session will be available soon.

This article is from E-invoicing Platform. Read the original post at: Basware/ABB webinar useful for project managers.

This post was originally written by Oriol Bausa as: “¿ISO 20022 Financial Invoice o ebXML CCTS CIIv2? (“ISO 20022 Financial CIIv2 Invoice or ebXML CCTS?) on: http://blog.invinet.org/?p=767.

Oriol Bausa is owner and CEO at Invinet Sistemes

Politically, it is understandable that a standard is recommended by an organization such as UN / CEFACT, which has had the task of facilitating e-business in the world for many years now.

For this reason it is understandable that the E-invoicing Expert Group recommend the UN / CEFACT Cross Industry Invoice version 2 (CII2).  CII2 is a standard but not very useful for practical purposes, as described in this post: http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=nl&sl=auto&tl=en&u=http%3A%2F%2Fblog.invinet.org%2F%3Fp%3D739

However, it is hard to understand that some members of the E-invoicing Expert Group – that originally recommended the UN/CEFACT CIIv2 standaard – are now trying to promote an entirely different standard: the ISO 20022 Financial Invoice.

How is it possible that within UN/CEFACT, the TBG1 group has been working with the CCTS methodology for many years to develop the model bill v.2 CII, while another group of the same organization (TBG5), dedicated to the development of a model called Financial Invoice, are using an entirely different approach, the ISO 20022?

And although politically intended to believe otherwise, the ISO 20022 and CII2 standards have nothing to do with each other, neither technically nor semantically. The mapping between ISO20022 and CII2 is so complicated (or simple) as between any of them and other standards like UBL, Facturae, Svefaktura, ebInterface …

In short, although very well recommended, for an electronic invoicing standard in Europe, it would be desirable to:

1. agree to creating/using a single model bill or abandoning its efforts.
2. recommend the members of the E-invoicing Expert Group to a bit of advice before deciding on a certain standard, and do research to what you recommend also really works.

A pity is also that countries where electronic billing is more advanced, couldn’t wait to have these standards that may have facilitated global interoperability and have already taken an other (proprietary) approach.

[Admin thoughts: In the meantime we see a serious uptake in the use of UBL. So, which will it be: UBL, ISO20022 or CII2? Or all at the same time..]

This article is from E-invoicing Platform. Read the original post at: UN/Cefact ISO 20022 XML or/and UN/Cefact CII2?.

This article is part of the co-author series of the EEI Platform. It was originally distributed by Bruno Koch founder and owner of Billentis. Billentis is an expert on EXPP. The original version of the article can be found at: http://billentis.com/Market2011.pdf

Number of users increasing sharply
Around 53,700 new E-Invoicing users are expected daily this year. Large suppliers push consumers to accept electronic invoices, or to receive penalty, e.g. charging EUR 2.50 per paper invoice. Companies are pushed by their trading parties to send or receive electronic invoices.

Legal changes, with possibly a 3rd option, resulting in market confusion as long as guidelines for “process control” are not clearly communicated by governments.

Market Figures Europe E-invoicing, E-billing

Source: http://billentis.com/Market2011.pdf

Channels Used for Electronic Invoices
The processed B2B volume is expected to reach 1,735 million E-Invoices this year (corresponding to 11.6% of all European B2B invoices). The B2C volume is estimated to reach 1,400 million E-Invoices (9.3% penetration).

Source: http://billentis.com/Market2011.pdf

Service Providers
Around 60 new operators are expected to appear this year in Europe. These are mainly providers with a focus on SME and providers from the financial industry segment. Although most providers remain focused on local markets, an increasing number are expanding their geographical reach, around 60 of them with VAT compliance for 30 or more countries. Merger & Acquisition deals are expected to rise this year from 14 (2010) 25. Major consolidation is expected in 2012/2013 when the market penetration of E-invoicing surpasses 15%.

Increasingly, e-invoicing providers are internationalising and diversifying their product portfolio, allowing them to attract customer from a multitude of countries. This also sparks the increasing co-operation between providers which creates interoperability between Platforms.

Some actions supported and/or steered by public sector
The European Commission aim to simplify and liberalise the legislation in member states and push interoperability and standards. They intend to set up a Multi-Stakeholder Forum on Electronic Invoicing

Other efforts are:

• CEN WS/INV3: Efforts in the areas standards, compliance, implementation and business processes
• PEPPOL: e-Procurement project of various EU countries
• Revision of Directive on e-signatures

See also: http://eeiplatform.com/3411/16-actions-towards-massive-eu-e-invoicing-adoption/

This article is from E-invoicing Platform. Read the original post at: Market penetration of e-invoicing in Europe.

By Jon Warner, CEO of  PaySwyft (UK)
This article was originally posted on Ezine @rticles

The question posed by this heading might seem to be quite simple at face value, but when we think about it, the answer is not exactly a straightforward one. This is because we are not always aware of the real costs of performing this quite complex task in all of its steps (whether it is done by traditional means or by online means).

In addition, while direct or tangible costs are relatively easy to identify, indirect costs are less easily identifiable and some of these are often very well hidden. Let’s therefore look at what tends to fall into these three categories of costs when comparing traditional paper-based billing versus full on-line or digital billing.

Direct Costs

At face value most people would estimate that a few “direct” costs are involved in paper-based billing. These may include:

•Invoice bill/file preparation/printing
•Paper invoices/bills
•Printing (ink or cartridge replacement)
•Envelopes
•Postage/Franking
•Offering basic payment options (debit, credit, other at standard fees)

Costs will fall as bill volumes increase for most of the above but even if they do postage or franking at about £0.40 to £0.45 pence will always be the biggest fee here. And the others will typically add as much as 30 to 35 pence making for a total of £0.70 to £0.80 of direct costs. Of course, if a merchant emails invoices (with a PDF attachment), instead of physically mailing them this may fall in half perhaps.

Indirect Costs

Costs are often deemed to be “indirect” because they are either fixed and/or cannot be wholly charged to the billing costs (especially if it is only part of a person’s job). However, even proportional costs add up here. Indirect costs may include:

•Customer service manpower to handle calls/queries
•Accounting/Reconciliation manpower
•Lost invoices (and the time taken to deal with this)
•Undelivered bills (and the time taken to deal with this)
•The cost of bill storage (space rental or fixed costs)
•Bill query handling time

Once again there may be some economies of scale in the above but all of these items (except bill storage perhaps) mainly involve having staff on the payroll or at call. Even at 500 bills a month, at least quarter a person would typically be involved in issuing and reconciling invoices and another quarter in handling queries, re-issuing bills or handling “special requests” related to invoicing or payments. If the cost of this person (or two part-timers) were £12,000 a year (£8,000 plus 50% salary/overhead burden) or £6,000 each, this £1,000 a month would amount to £2 per bill.

Hidden Costs

Costs are often deemed to be “hidden” because no-one is scrutinising or controlling them (they go unmeasured or unaccounted for or are lost in general overhead or the broad costs of doing business). Hidden costs may include:

•Extra or hidden payment transaction fees (which may be fixed or higher than necessary)
•Invoice/billing run or payment processing errors
•The need for a higher than wanted or necessary float/overdraft at the bank
•Possible added customers or more business from having more payment options
•Quicker settlement/cycle time (by use of SMS or email alerts)
•Easier training of staff/opportunity to focus staff elsewhere with time saved
•Potential cash-flow acceleration
•Easier/cheaper compliance and audit work with digital billing
•Lower/No cost digital marketing opportunities
•Overall incremental “Green” benefits/credits

The benefits to an organisation of the long list above are obviously much harder to calculate but a variety of studies in recent years have suggested that these can conservatively add up to as much as 3% of revenues or as much as 15% of profit. If we assume our little company doing 500 bills a month has an average transaction or “ticket” value of £40, turnover per month is £20,000 or £240,000 per annum. If we assume that profit is 15% of this or £36,000, this all means that the cost per bill is somewhere between £0.90 to £1.20.

So in summary, if we add all of these costs together which have a total traditional or paper-based billing cost of £3.60 to £4 or 9.5% of the revenue collected each time (£40 average ticket value). Now that’s a quite a serious amount of money for this little company not to take pretty seriously! But what about your company?-what is 9.5% of your revenues? And when you have calculated it in cold hard cash, can you afford not to investigate the potential to save as much as half of this as recurrent savings every year by moving to digital billing?

___________________________

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Jon_Warner

This article is from E-invoicing Platform. Read the original post at: What is the real cost of paper versus electronic billing or invoicing?.

It has only been since the early 90’s that email has been adopted by the vast majority of communicators worldwide and it seemed that this would be the unbeatable way of communicating.

Right now, the new situation is that email is for old people – literally. A survey by ComScore explains that especially the new generation internet users has massively turned to social networking to contact each other.

The use of email dropped 59 percent among users aged between 12 and 17. Email has lost an overall part of 8 percent, according to ComScore’s 2010 Digital Year in Review. Users between 18 and 54 have also turned to substitutes for email, whereas people of 55 and older have actually embraced email tighter than before. In time, email could be pushed off the road by social media when these forms are optimized concerning their messaging system.

Young people are turning to social networks to communicate instead of traditional means. The activity accounts for 14 percent of time spent online in the U.S. That growth is fueled largely by Facebook, which has only continued to expand its reach in the past year, as expected. No less than 10 percent of page views in the U.S. are on Facebook, and the amount of users grew by 38 percent to 153.9 million users in America. Total time spent on the Facebook site went up 79 percent to 49.4 billion minutes. Moreover, Facebook is not ready yet: when their new messaging system catches on, email providers such as Gmail might have a strong new competitor.

Facebook is the largest but not the only part of the social networking picture. Nine out of every ten online users visited social networking sites by the end of 2010. LinkedIn grew by 30 percent to 26.6 million users, as Twitter grew 18 percent to 23.6 million users, and Tumblr saw 168 percent growth to 6.7 million users. MySpace saw a decrease of 26 percent, dropping to 50 million users.

So pay attention to the new ways of (social) communication with e-invoicing and e-billing!

Source:
ComScore and Huffington Post

This article is from E-invoicing Platform. Read the original post at: Times are changing: email traded for social networks?.

The regulation effectively removes restrictions that limited the use of e-invoices. Previously, issuing, sending and storing e-invoices was only possible through the use of electronic data interchange (EDI) or by using an qualified electronic signature. Just like in any other country, compliance with these rules proved to be expensive and, in practice, a restricting in the use of e-invoices.

Already in May 2010, Poland’s Supreme Administrative Court held that it was allowed to send an invoice as an attachment in an email. This e-invoice even after being printed by the receiver, could be treated as a paper invoice, allowing for VAT deduction.

This recent regulation affords businesses an opportunity to issue, send and store invoices in any electronic format. Just like current and upcoming EU legislation acceptance from the customer is still needed Even though this can be achieved either explicitly or implicitly and either in electronic format or in writing.

To send invoices electronically, two conditions must be satisfied:

* Authenticity of origin—certainty that the identity of the person supplying the goods or service, is the issuer of the invoice

* Integrity of content—invoice data has not been altered

The former requirements for a qualified electronic signature and to use EDI no longer apply; however, both methods are mentioned in the new guidance as examples of how to satisfy the required conditions for e-invoices. Sending an PDF invoice per e-mail is also permitted. As well as storing your invoices electronically.

Source: KPMG

This article is from E-invoicing Platform. Read the original post at: Poland no longer requires qualified signature or EDI with e-invoicing.

The European Commission today adopted a proposal to change the VAT Directive 2006/112/EC in respect to the invoicing rules, based on a Communication on the technological developments in the field of electronic invoicing. The aim of the proposal is to increase the use of electronic invoicing, reduce burdens on business, support small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) and help Member States to tackle fraud. The proposal simplifies, modernises and harmonises the VAT invoicing rules. In particular, it eliminates the current barriers to e-invoicing in the VAT Directive by treating paper and electronic invoices equally. The proposal is a key element of the Commission’s Action Programme to reduce burdens on business by 25% by 2012, and is part of the Commission’s strategy to combat VAT fraud more efficiently.

László Kovács, Commissioner for Taxation and Customs, said: “Current national VAT invoicing rules are excessively complicated and disparate. This has led to unnecessary administrative burdens on businesses operating cross-border and has also facilitated VAT carousel fraud. Today’s important initiative will put forward much simpler, more modern and comprehensive rules for invoicing, whilst allowing tax administrations effective means of control. Paper and electronic invoices will be treated equally which will allow businesses to move to a 100% e-invoicing system and to save up to 18 billion euros across the EU”.

The Communication and the proposal reflect the real concerns of the business community and tax administrations, as indicated in their replies to the public consultation. A recent opinion of the High Level Group of Independent Stakeholders (HLG) also showed a demand for all the VAT aspects of invoicing to be looked at more widely. The proposal adopted today, therefore, not only addresses the VAT obstacles which hamper the up-take of electronic invoicing, but it also addresses difficulties that businesses face in respect to issuing and storing (especially electronically storing) of invoices, as well as discrepancies of the content of invoices.

The Commission believes that it is necessary to increase the up-take of electronic invoicing, by removing the pre-conditions of advanced electronic signatures or electric data interchange (EDI) for sending invoices electronically. Moreover, the electronic storage of invoices will be allowed, even if the original invoice is in paper format, and common storage periods are set.

Other measures to help reduce burdens on business include the removal of the many options available to Member States, thereby creating a harmonised set of invoicing rules. This will help those businesses that want to implement practices such as self-billing or summary invoices and will allow the larger businesses to centralise their invoicing.

To help SMEs, the proposal widens the use of simplified invoicing, notably for small value invoices (up to 200 euros) which will be of particular benefit for smaller businesses. It also allows simplified invoicing for business to consumer (B2C) supplies and certain VAT exempt supplies where the risk of fraud islimited. In addition, and of direct benefit to SMEs, is the option for Member States to introduce a cash accounting scheme under which the tax becomes due only when the invoice is paid.

Notwithstanding the measures to help reduce burdens on business and promote SMEs, safeguards are maintained or enhanced to help the authorities to tackle VAT fraud. As businesses operating cross-border will have to report their transactions in the month of the supply, fraudsters will not be able to abuse the possibility of including an invoice in a later reporting period. Moreover, the rules on the right to VAT deductions are strengthened in respect to the requirement to hold a valid invoice and as regards the contents of invoices.

Background

The VAT Directive requires that the Commission present a report and, if appropriate, a proposal amending the conditions for electronic invoicing. With the need also to address shortcomings with regard to other VAT rules on invoicing, the scope of the report and the accompanying proposal have been widened to include all aspects of the invoicing rules.

Questions and answers on technical issues of the proposal are available at this web page:

http://ec.europa.eu/taxation_customs/taxation/vat/traders/invoicing_rules/index_en.htm

Further information on the Communication and the proposal can be found at:

Communication:

http://ec.europa.eu/taxation_customs/taxation/vat/key_documents/communications/index_en.htm

Proposal for a Directive:

http://ec.europa.eu/taxation_customs/taxation/vat/key_documents/legislation_proposed/index_en.htm

The Commission sought the views of the public and commissioned a study on invoicing in order to be better informed as to the problems faced by business in respect to invoicing.

Further information on the public consultation and invoicing study can be found at:

http://ec.europa.eu/taxation_customs/common/consultations/tax/index_en.htm

Invoicing study:

http://ec.europa.eu/taxation_customs/common/publications/studies/index_en.htm

This article is from E-invoicing Platform. Read the original post at: VAT: Commission proposes a review of the VAT rules on invoicing.

Basware was awarded this recognition because of its innovative leadership in invoice automation, procurement and global commerce connectivity solutions that improve supplier and buyer relationships and promote electronic document exchange around the world, through one of the world’s largest open networks for e-invoice and purchase message transactions. Its innovative Connectivity Services cut transaction and processing costs in half, while eliminating paper-based invoices and streamlining invoice processing.  Basware has also expanded its offerings to reach the small-to-medium-sized businesses, in addition to its traditional enterprise customers.

We’re honored to be included again this year in Global Finance’s annual ranking of the best treasury and cash management providers,” said Ari Salonen, Basware’s general manager, North America.  “The award recognizes our commitment to helping companies around the world achieve improved global commerce and gain real-time visibility and control of finances.”

Basware’s innovative purchase-to-pay solutions are based on more than 20 years of technology expertise and incorporate the best practices of all of its customers. Its products enable companies to address issues, such as establishing financial practices to support global commerce and address multiple currencies and languages; managing and strengthening supplier relationships and reducing supplier risk; effectively managing spend, cash flow and working capital; complying with industry regulations worldwide; enforcing green policies and corporate values; and extracting key financial data from disparate ERPs and back-end systems.

“In recognition of the growing role of treasury technology providers, both bank and non-bank, we have selected Best Treasury Management Systems & Services providers across 12 categories,” said Global Finance publisher Joseph D. Giarraputo. “In today’s competitive global economic environment, treasurers need the best tools and advice available to make capital work harder than ever. Our awards identify the banks and providers of products and services that consistently improve transaction processes to speed collections and reduce risks.”
Global Finance editors, with input from industry analysts, corporate executives and technology experts, selected the best providers of treasury and cash management services. A variety of subjective and objective criteria were used for choosing the winners. Factors considered included: profitability, market share and reach, customer service, competitive pricing, product innovation and the extent to which treasury and cash management banks have successfully differentiated themselves from their competitors around core treasury and cash management service provision.

This article is from E-invoicing Platform. Read the original post at: Global Finance names Basware best E-Invoice Presentation & Payment Provider.

A few weeks ago Europol, EU’s defence against the dark arts, released their rapport (or iOCTA as they call it) on cybercrime. Underneath or some highlights from this illusive rapport:

• Global corporate losses because of cybercrime stands at around €750 billion per year (source: McAfee). That is per year almost 19 times more than the maximum amount that can be saved with e-invoicing and e-billing. And new illegal activities, including crime-ware distribution and the hacking of corporate databases are increasing that number. That gets one thinking.
• Criminals are trading credit card data for up to $30 per card, bank account information for between $10 – $125 and even your email account data is worth up to $12 in this sophisticated and self–sufficient economy.
• Here comes the scary part for online e-invoicing and e-billing: ‘Criminals are not only interested in details of credit cards and compromised bank accounts, but also our addresses, phone numbers, social security numbers, full names and dates of birth’. So, the more widespread e-invoicing is becoming, the likelier the rest will become that cybercriminals are going to focus on (online) billing service providers). So another key action towards 2020 massive e-invoicing adoption: be sure to have made security a non-issue.
• EU Member States already rank amongst the most highly infected countries in the world when it comes to computer viruses and malware. The EU is a key target for cybercrime because of its advanced Internet infrastructure, rates of adoption and increasingly Internet-mediated economies and payment systems.
• Emerging trends like cloud computing and corporate social networks (like Yammer) pose problems when it comes to cybercrime: a threat to users and a challenge to law enforcement. Or the other way around.

More information:
Press release: http://www.europol.europa.eu/index.asp?page=news&news=pr110106.htm

Rapport: http://www.europol.europa.eu/publications/Serious_Crime_Overviews/Internet_Facilitated_Organised_Crime_iOCTA.pdf

Go to our Open LinkedIN Discussion and leave your comment

This article is from E-invoicing Platform. Read the original post at: The impact of cybercrime on e-invoicing: five highlights.

Whereas with processing paper invoices, approximately 60% of the emissions are generated by labour and 40% are generated by paper, envelopes, printing, franking and distribution. With e-invoices the labour ratio sours to 99%.

The carbon footprint of an electronic invoice is therefore considerably smaller than that of a paper invoice. A paper invoice generates approximately 450 grams of greenhouse gases, while an electronic invoice can generate as little as 150.

It should be noted that this study dealt with structured e-invoices. Not PDF’s. Even though SME’s prefer to use PDF’s. And with a 99% market share of SME’s in mind the outcomes of this research have to be put in that context. On the other hand the research notes that SME’s that seek to reduce costs by switching to invoices in PDF format are not gaining the most important benefits of electronic invoices.

The research also shows that in addition to the environmental benefits, switching to e-invoices frees resources, making a company more efficient. Freed resources can be used, for example, to improve customer service.

This information comes from a study recently published by the Federation of Finnish Financial Services.

This article is from E-invoicing Platform. Read the original post at: Finnish Research shows: e-invoice is more efficient and eco friendly.

Needless to say, the digital world is in your hands nowadays. Everything you need regarding communication and related subjects can be implemented in your personal mobile phone. Working on your administration is also no longer an activity you can only perform at home or at the office.

The EEI Platform selected a number of e-invoicing applications for your iPhone or  iPad to loosen your administration from time and place.
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Invoice2go
Invoice2go is the fast and easy way to invoice, estimate, bill, collect and report. With 10 built-in invoice styles to choose from it’s actually fun going through and choosing your template and designing your invoice. Even better if you install the Desktop Version all these templates can be customized to your own needs. Add logo’s, move fields you can even create your very own business forms. No other solution available gives you this flexibility.

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Time Master + Billing + Quickbooks
The best, most powerful, comprehensive, easy to use time keeping app on the Apple Store is now even better. Time Master has the highest average rating of all the time management apps. And the other apps don’t come close to our new optional billing module. Our invoices are totally professional. Please click on the “On-Core website” link below to view Video demos of the program in action.
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GetPaid! – PDF Invoice & Time Sheet
GetPaid! tracks time and generates instant PDF invoices and time sheets. The beautiful and intuitive user interface is designed to log your time and to create professional invoices or time sheets in a snap. Getpaid! is a must have app for mobile professionals, business owners, temps, freelancers, contractors, consultants, lawyers or anyone who needs to track their time to get paid. Time is money, don’t miss another minute! You’ve worked hard, now it’s time to GetPaid!

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Ring It Up Pro: Invoicing & Checkout
RedLaser has joined forces with Ring it Up to bring to you the most comprehensive Point of Sale application available for the iPhone today. Ring up your sales, expenses & accept payment, right on your iPhone. Bookkeeping no longer has to be a chore.

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Invoice Maker
Finally, after much demand, the perfect tool for your business on the iPhone! Using this app you will be able to send state-of-the-art invoices via e-mail to your clients. You can create invoices for products AND services.

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Billings Touch
Billings Touch takes the Apple Design Award winning time tracking and invoicing experience from the Mac and puts it in your pocket. Billings Touch works as a standalone application – or as a companion to Billings on the Mac.

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GetPaid! Lite – PDF Invoice & TimeSheet
GetPaid! tracks time and generates instant PDF invoices and time sheets. The beautiful and intuitive user interface is designed to log your time and to create invoices or time sheets in a snap. Getpaid! is a must have app for mobile professionals, business owners, temps, freelancers, contractors, consultants, lawyers or anyone who needs to track their time to get paid. Time is money, don’t miss another minute! You’ve worked hard, now it’s time to GetPaid!

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Omni Invoice
Why not try before you buy. Please download our free version, Omni Invoice Lite.With Omni Invoice you can now create quotes and invoices anywhere.

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Invoice2go Lite
Invoice2go is the fast and easy way to invoice, estimate, bill, collect and report. With 10 built-in invoice styles to choose from it’s actually fun going through and choosing your template and designing your invoice. Even better if you install the Desktop Version all these templates can be customized to your own needs. Add logo’s, move fields you can even create your very own business forms. No other solution available gives you this flexibility.

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Omni Invoice Lite
With Omni Invoice Lite you can now create quotes and invoices anywhere. No more downtime spent writing up quotes back at the office, or catching up with your backlog of invoicing causing delays in payment.

Omni Invoice Lite enables you to create quotes whilst on site, delivering them by email in seconds. Generating invoices from your quotes is an equally simple process.

Quick and intuitive to use, simply populate Omni Invoice Lite with your products, services and company details, then start billing.
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Invoice Now
Run your business from your iPhone. Missing Piece is proud to bring you Invoice Now.
Invoice Now is the invoice only version of Taking Care of Business. It creates secure PDF invoices in a professional format which can be emailed directly from your iPhone. Copy or blind copy the invoices back to your office.

Invoice Now includes an optional invoice calculator for building up more complex invoices. It also builds a history database as you use it – no need to spend hours entering your inventory before you use the application.
Record payments against your invoices. View a record of all your receivables grouped according to due date. Resend invoices as reminders.

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Quick Invoice
If you freelance or own a business, you have probably faced the tedious task of creating and sending invoices while away from the office. Now, with Quick Invoice that nightmare is over. Quick Invoice allows you to easily generate and send invoices. You only have to choose your customer, the service, tax, numbering and pay option and, in less than 5 seconds, your customer will be able to receive the invoice via e-mail..
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Smart Invoice
The Smart Invoice iPhone application allows you to remotely use Smart Invoice to:
• Create new clients, projects, and tasks on the fly
• Track time by client, project and task
• Create and categorize expenses
• Create invoices
• Receive credit card payments for invoices you create on your iPhone (currently works with Authorize.net)—this functionality essentially turns your iPhone into a mobile credit card processor.

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Our Bills
Bills are constantly coming and money is tight especially during these hard economic times. That is why it is so important to keep track of our everyday expenses. We have created this great new application that will let you keep track of your bills in a convenient, quick and organized way so that you always have this information at hand for your convenience. Unlike similar applications here you will be able to add your partner’s and combined bills, as well as categorized them.

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Easy Biller
Do you live your work day in six minute increments? Do you sometimes lose track of time when you’re on the go? Easy Biller is here to help. What does this app do?

- Calculates billable hours with a variety of tools including a timer and start/stop time converter
- Tracks your daily, weekly and monthly and year billable hours totals
- Organizes time entries by client and case names and numbers: enter as much or little detail as you prefer
- Allows you to enter detailed descriptions of your time
- Produces an easy-to-read, emailable table of your time entries at the end of each day
-Also includes a handy converter for figuring out hours without adding new entry to database.

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Simplybill
Simplybill provides a great invoicing solution in your pocket. Designed to run along-side the Simplybill online invoicing service, the Simplybill App provides all the functions you need on the go.

In order to use the Simplybill iPhone App, you need a Simplybill account – if you don’t have one, sign up for a free-trial at www.simplybill.com. Plans cost from $5/month.

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Source: www.iphoneapplicationlist.com

This article is from E-invoicing Platform. Read the original post at: Flashback: E-invoicing applications for your iPhone.

Release 1.1 provides several new features, one of which is the possibility to force suppliers to send e-invoices (Thanks to Pieter Breyne). Other features are:

• a new ‘Retrieve request’ web service allowing users to retrieve an XML version of any document stored in the system, as well as a full implementation of the submit and validate catalogue features (with email notification support to users)
• partial support of the LIME profile (Send documents only) between lightweight clients and PEPPOL Access Points. More details on LIME profiles are available on the PEPPOL website.
• updated test suite that integrates the new features mentioned above.

The full list of web services provided by Open e-PRIOR v1.1 is the following:

• Submit Invoice *
• Submit Credit Note *
• Submit Attached Document *
• View document
• Query Request
• Status Request
• Retrieve Request
• Submit Order *
• Submit Catalogue

* Service is also available through the use of the PEPPOL Access Points.
Further Information:

• Registering at the OSOR website and participating in the OSOR community;
• Downloading the latest version of Open e-PRIOR from OSOR.eu;
• Reading the documentation about Open e-PRIOR, including a guide on how to get Open e-PRIOR running and the Software Architecture document;
• Contacting the dedicated e-PRIOR team either via e-mail: DIGIT-EPRIOR-SUPPORT@ec.europa.eu or in the forum at OSOR: http://forge.osor.eu/forum/?group_id=188.
• e-PRIOR LinkedIn Group – http://www.linkedin.com/groups?mostPopular=&gid=3686902)

This article is from E-invoicing Platform. Read the original post at: New version of the e-procurement service Open e-Prior.

WHAT’S THE ISSUE?

in your home country. This applies to:

• bank transfers
• direct debits
• credit/debit card payments
• withdrawals from cash dispensers (ATMs).

To do this, EU countries’ individual payment systems have to be phased out and replaced

by existing EU-wide system, within 12 to 24 months. Despite significant progress, this is happening too slowly – the EU wants to speed up the process.

WHAT EXACTLY WOULD CHANGE?
The EU is to:

• set deadlines for the 2 main payment methods – bank transfers and direct debits –to

move to the SEPA scheme: 1 and 2 years respectively.

• ban the use of hidden fees between banks for direct debit transactions; currently

charged in 6 countries.

WHO WOULD BENEFIT AND HOW?

• Individuals and businesses would be able to make payments throughout the EU easily,

cheaply and reliably.

• The cost of direct debits would become clearer.
• The cost of direct debits and bank transfers could come down even more, as there would

be greater competition in the banking industry.

• The resulting innovation, alongside the cheaper cost of moving money around the EU, could

stimulate economic growth worth €300 bn in the first 6 years – if the changes are made fully

and quickly.

WHY DOES ACTION HAVE TO BE TAKEN BY THE EU?

• As of August 2010, only 9.3% of all bank transfers in the eurozone were made using the EUwide

system (source: European Central Bank). If this trend continues, the full benefits of

• SEPA would not be felt for 30 years.
• As this is an EU-wide project requiring action in multiple countries, all parties involved

recognise that swift progress depends on action at EU level.

WHEN IS THE PROPOSAL LIKELY TO COME INTO EFFECT?

• During 2011 (following debate by the EU Council and European Parliament).

Source: http://ec.europa.eu/internal_market/payments/docs/sepa/citizens_summary_en.pdf

This article is from E-invoicing Platform. Read the original post at: SEPA: A Citizens’ summary.

Across Europe, a massive 28 billion invoices are still sent by mail. Every paper invoice currently costs an average of more than GBP10 to process. Pitney Bowes Invoice Process Automation service tackles the huge amounts of unnecessary cost and wasted effort inherent in the average invoicing process, both payables and receivables.

The typical costs of invoicing are significantly reduced by going digital which removes expenses such as re-keying, potential late payment penalties and paper processing. Pitney Bowes Invoice Process Automation puts in place a solution that automates the invoice process whatever the invoice formats – be they eInvoice, paper, email or EDI.

Because Invoice Process Automation is an outsourced service there is no set up delay or big up-front expense: users can start saving from day one. In addition, savings continue to increase as the eInvoice technology is rolled-out to a user’s suppliers and customers. Unlike most solutions which rely heavily on the percentage of digitisation to deliver savings, Pitney Bowes is able to leverage their production and mail expertise to significantly reduce the cost of residual hard copy processing.

Invoice Process Automation speeds up invoice cycle times and reduces the cost of invoicing by:

• Converting a user’s suppliers to using eInvoicing through the Invoice Process Automation rollout process.

• Merging all types of invoice formats into a consistent invoice image and data set, avoiding data keying and manual validation.

• Creating an invoice approval workflow that simplifies the management of exceptions.

• Eliminating transit delay, with invoices automatically transferred to the next approver.

• Attacking approval bottlenecks – user’s can see where invoices are queuing at a glance by invoice number, approver or supplier.

• Conducting three-way matching and handling exceptions at speed.

• Tracking approvals and eradicating fraud with clear audit trails.

Pitney Bowes’ Invoice Process Automation service can also take standard Accounts Receivable output (often an invoice print run) and automate despatch in the customer’s format of choice. This flexibility to adapt to the customer’s processes rather than requesting that their systems align helps to expedite payment and strengthen customer relationships.

Hedley Walker, Solutions Director, Pitney Bowes, comments: “The invoicing function is a time-consuming and costly burden for too many businesses.

“50% of an average company’s business to business communications are generated by or received by the finance department, a major overhead in terms of time and budget. By automating as much as possible we create what we call a “straight through process” where only exceptions need human intervention. This not only reduces costs but liberates the finance team for more proactive activities like analysis and strategic planning.”

For more information on Invoice Process Automation and Pitney Bowes’ broader communication management services, visit http://www.straightthroughbusiness.com.

http://www.pbms.co.uk

About Pitney Bowes
Celebrating its 90th year of innovation, Pitney Bowes provides software, hardware and services that integrate physical and digital communications channels. Long known for making its customers more productive, Pitney Bowes is increasingly helping other companies grow their business. Pitney Bowes is a $5.6 billion company and employs 33,000 worldwide. Pitney Bowes: Every connection is a new opportunity . http://www.pb.com

This article is from E-invoicing Platform. Read the original post at: Pitney Bowes: Reducing the cost of invoice processing.

It will mean that national credit transfers and direct debits are phased out and the recently created pan-European systems take their place, respectively 12 and 24 months after the entry into force of the Regulation.

This will reduce the costs of payments, increase competition and make cross-border payments as easy as domestic ones. The Commission’s proposal now passes to the European Parliament and the Member States for consideration.

Internal Market and Services Commissioner Michel Barnier said: “We have a Single Market, many countries share a single currency and soon we will move to a single pan-European payment system in Europe. It means that making payments cross-border will become as easy as making them at home. Consumers will only need one bank account and their payments will be faster, cheaper and safer. Businesses will benefit from one set of standards and much simpler processes. The proposal adopted today fixes end-dates to make this pan-European system a reality, hopefully as early as 2012.”

Self-regulatory efforts have proven not to be sufficient to drive forward concerted migration to SEPA. According to available European Central Bank (ECB) data, as of October, only 9.6 % of all credit transfers in the euro area were executed using a pan-European payment instrument.

Trend
If this trend continues, the full benefits or implementation of the SEPA would only be felt after more than 25 years. Only rapid migration to pan-European SEPA credit transfers and direct debits, will generate the full benefits of an integrated payments market. The proposed Regulation aims to ensure a quick and smooth migration to pan-European credit transfers and direct debits by phasing out the existing national payment instruments.

In order to ensure interoperability, the use of certain common standards and technical requirements such as the use of international bank account numbers (IBAN), bank identifier codes (BIC) and a financial services messaging standard (ISO 20022 XML) will be mandatory for all bank account payments in euro in the EU. The proposed regulation also takes into account user concerns such as the possibility to limit a direct debit collection to a certain amount and/or frequency of payments. Banks and companies which send out a large number of bills (for example electricity or telecommunications providers) are encouraged to adopt measures to make SEPA migration as easy as possible for bank account holders.

The proposed Regulation also aims to increase transparency and competition between payment services providers and between payment services themselves, notably through the ban on hidden fees between banks for direct debit transactions, which are currently charged in six Member States (Spain, France, Sweden, Belgium, Portugal and Italy).

Background information

- Press release: Commission sets deadlines for migration to SEPA
- FAQs: Full SEPA (Single Euro Payments Area) Migration
- EC proposal: Proposal for a Regulation establishing technical requirements for credit transfers and direct debits in euros and amending Regulation (EC) No 924/2009

This article is from E-invoicing Platform. Read the original post at: Commission sets deadlines for migration to SEPA.

Any business or organization generating high volumes of business communication for their customer base such as financial institutions, insurance companies, utilities, telcos, hospitals, or government agencies, has a critical need to disseminate the most up-to-date information quickly and accurately to end users. However, if a law is changed or terms/conditions are revised and the material reflecting these changes is either inaccurate or not distributed in a timely manner, an institution leaves itself vulnerable to potentially massive fines for non-compliance or even litigation.

Additionally, business and marketing users are pressed hard to keep up with shorter product lifecycles, rapidly shifting consumer behavior and new channels of customer communication. Yet too often their dependency on IT can make simple text or layout changes for marketing messages, legal disclaimers, logos, or new contract templates a matter of months and finally outvalue the potential gains. A common approach to overcome this dilemma is to decentralize document composition using standard office tools or island solutions but this again creates issues with compliance and CI and increased time-to-market and usually turns out to be even more inefficient and costlier.

The ideal solution would therefore unleash the power of multi-channel communications, reduce time-to-market, enable document reuse, and enforce compliance while business and marketing users retain control over their documents and reduce their dependency on IT.

The Papyrus Platform from ISIS Papyrus provides the ability to automatically close the communications loop across all channels and to deliver personalized communications, integrated marketing campaigns, TransPromo campaigns, and structured ad-hoc communication for increased customer retention while achieving full compliance through process-embedded regulation and audit control.

Watch the ISIS Papyrus presentation on video

This article is from E-invoicing Platform. Read the original post at: E-Documents: Cost savings and simplified compliance bij ISIS Papyrus.

This recent development is part of the new strategy of ISIS Papyrus to support mobile applications and will be followed up by support for Windows Mobile 7 and Symbian.

We have investigated the benefits of the Papyrus iPhone app and asked people who already employ it in their everyday business. A senior product manager at a major telecommunications provider put it like this:

“We want to offer this app both to our customer service reps as well as to a very well-defined target group of customers as a value proposition. Our staff will now have a huge amount of documents available to service their clients instantly without the need of opening and connecting their notebook first or even the need of having their notebooks with them. On the customer’s request and with proper authorization they can edit or annotate those documents and the changes will be reflected throughout the entire organization. Customers are given access to their documents without any intermediary and at any given time. But this is only part of the story.

However well designed a customer offering may be, it will fail when poorly executed. We use the advantages of the Papyrus Platform in its entirety to provide a unified experience for the customer. First we enable and promote the collaboration of cross-functional teams from sales and marketing to logistics and supplies in our own organization and with partners and we highly value any communication with our customers as a precious resource. Because it is not so much data mining and other statistic guesswork that tells you what your customers want, they will rather tell you personally if you are ready to listen to them. And we certainly are!”

On asking if they were just jumping the bandwagon to capitalize on the popularity of the iPhone he adds the following:

“This all is not just a new random offering but part of an integrated strategy of providing a service platform for highly targeted individuals. Papyrus allows everyone in the organization to understand, subscribe to and fulfill the importance of the customer experience and our commitment to make it valuable and pleasant. This is not a one-off effort but a an ongoing process which we couldn’t manage without an integrated communications platform.”

At this point he is assisted by the VP of Costumer Services who had joined our conversation earlier and points out:

“By integrating the whole communication with the customer at each touchpoint we can focus on the entire customer experience. Each interaction of the customer with different departments of our company is equally important and Papyrus gives us the complete transparency to track these interactions by providing all of our staff with access to all customer-related communications together with real-time data in a single view.”

To find out how the WebArchive iPhone app can help you in fulfilling your organization’s strategic goals read a detailed description and a list of features here or get it at the Apple Appstore.

www.isis-papyrus.com

This article is from E-invoicing Platform. Read the original post at: ISIS Papyrus: WebArchive goes mobile with iPhone.

Group for Ariba customers to share ideas, best practices and ask questions. Beverly Dunn has recently published the following tip about communication towards customers.

Executive Support: Sr. leadership support: need to utter one vision andone direction for everyone. Professional buyers need to communicate the same vision to all of their suppliers.

Clean Up Your Own Records First: normalization of PO’s, vendor record database, DUNS number, the right supplier contact, etc.

Prioritize Suppliers: Always use the 90/10 rule, concentrate on 10% of suppliers for creating 90% of errors, identify priority not just by volume but by problems (paper suppliers)

Communicate: plan ahead, use various training programs, hold many suppliers communications (recorded webinars, notifications), have your buyers work closely with your suppliers, show them the value and benefits, stand firm with your position (“we want you to do it this way”)

Show The Full Picture: Should always think about how to fully enable suppliers, including PO, punch-out, catalog, invoice, etc.

Value to Suppliers: Strengthens your business relationship, faster payment, payment status, access to other Ariba customers.

Beverly Dunn is a Customer Success  Manager with Ariba. Ariba has set up a private Customer Success group on Ariba Exchange, where you can access the Customer Success Spotlights, Lunch ‘n Learn Webinar calendar and replays, and the Ariba Knowledge Nuggets. Read about it here

This article is from E-invoicing Platform. Read the original post at: An Ariba tip: Supplier Enablement – Adoption.

The bank implemented a banking portal as a virtual customer service branch office. Outstanding customer service by providing 24/7 access for personalized statements and reports were set as requirements. Depending on the client profile, the same document must also be printable in high quality, automatically be enveloped and mailed. Leveraging existing business data directly from the business application on the mainframe for electronic document presentment and optional printing was a prerequisite.

Read more about the ISIS Papyrus case here

This article is from E-invoicing Platform. Read the original post at: Case Study: Internet Banking with ISIS Papyrus.

Some people at SWIFT are convinced that ISO 20022 can bring profound benefits to the financial services industry. They claim it realises end-to-end processing across domains and geographies that currently use vastly different standards and information formats.

This online ‘Dummies’ booklet tends to remove the mystery from ISO 20022, and helps to understand why it matters to Swift, and lets readers see how one can benefit from ISO 20022.

Read all about it here:

http://viewer.zmags.com/publication/f9ecbbbc#/f9ecbbbc/44

http://www.sksf.ch/dokumente/fachkommissionen/RMG_ISO_20022/Iso20022-for-Dummies.pdf

This article is from E-invoicing Platform. Read the original post at: ISO 20022 for Dummies published.

Finance and procurement departments will seek new methods of measuring successful cost cutting to reflect market volatility.

Basware, the global leader in purchase-to-pay solutions, has today announced its annual predictions for the key trends and issues that will dominate the CFO agenda in 2011.  This year, themes are driven by the longer term and more complex fallout from the tough economic times. Volatility, forecasting and risk will be the key issues affecting businesses throughout 2011, Basware predicts, as companies attempt to establish stability and predictability in a constantly changing global market.

1. Cost reduction is still a huge issue for businesses, caught between their cash and cost cultures. Whilst businesses have been careful with their cash, making sure that they have money on hand, they are still keen to reduce costs as much as possible, and ensure that they maintain strong levels of profitability.

2. Volatility will be key next year as constant fluctuations in currency and commodities are set to have a sizeable impact on the bottom line for businesses. This volatility makes it increasingly difficult for businesses to plan and effectively forecast the bottom line for their business, resulting in ‘stocking up’ on inventory when costs are low, leaving businesses with excessive storage costs.  This creates cash instability, as much of a business’ cash flow can be tied up in stock. Whilst ‘currency madness’ is the current focus of procurement teams, commodity inflation is the danger on the horizon, and currency and commodity volatility will remain front of mind. Volatility is a constantly shifting danger, and organizations need to be aware that issues such as changing tax regulations, and trade imbalance and risk can rapidly alter the landscape.

3. Where procurement teams have traditionally been measured on a Purchase Price Variant (PPV) comparison, next year Basware predicts that CFOs will seek longer term cost/saving measurements that take into account inventory costs and supplier risk, and that strip out commodity variance. As the economy becomes more stable, teams will be looking to more stable measurements, which will continue to ensure profitability in the long-term.

4. Globalization presents a great opportunity, but also a huge challenge for organizations. In order to ensure that companies are poised for growth, they need to have efficient, easy and agile transactional relationships across their global supply base. Multiple data formats, changing legislative requirements and a fragmented supplier base can leave CFO’s struggling to find efficient solutions for transacting globally. Open trading platforms requiring no proprietary technologies allow companies of all sizes to transact electronically and achieve operational excellence in their global trading relations. Last year, companies such as Toshiba TEC Germany realized significant savings through switching to e-invoicing, with invoicing costs dropping by 75 percent. Next year, many more will follow their lead.

5. Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) initiatives will continue to feature in the CFO agenda next year, despite the continued tough climate, although for different reasons in different geographies. In the US, it will be for cost savings, however in the EU, the primary driver will be regulation to provide more eco-friendly and sustainable working practices.

“2011 will see businesses focus on longer-term supply deals and processes, whilst continuing to face increasingly complex challenges, that frequently do not have a simple answer,” said Steve Muddiman, Senior Vice President, Basware. “Next year, volatility and cost reduction will continue to play a major role for organizations. As the economy becomes increasingly stable, businesses are planning and preparing further ahead than in recent times. For businesses to navigate the challenging times to come, accurate forecasting and appropriate measurement for inventory costs will be essential considerations.”

This article is from E-invoicing Platform. Read the original post at: Basware: Volatility, risk and forecasting will dominate in 2011.

“We used to have payment terms of 60 days, and now we can process all invoices within 12 days”, says Paulo Steverink, Group Controller of Mammoet, a specialist in heavy lifting and transport solutions.

Mammoet is a Dutch family business headquartered in Schiedam and with offices around the world, including England, Belgium, Germany, Canada, USA, Dubai, Singapore, Australia, Thailand and Malaysia. “The invoices received by our offices around the world are now centrally processed immediately after local digitalization. Thanks to the seamless integration between software from Ricoh, ReadSoft and SAP, we now have complete control over the entire invoice process.”

Bottlenecks of the manual process
“Invoices were received centrally by our accounts payable department and then sent by regular post to the local offices for review. Our major problem was that with this long manual process, invoices where often found at the bottom of a pile of paper at the approver’s desk, or got lost. The payment terms of 60 days were hardly ever met. We were stuck in a reactive routine: only if a supplier called for a payment, we went looking for the invoice. Crazy, but that is what happens when you are stuck in a bad process” says Steverink.

Ricoh, ReadSoft and SAP software in seamless integration
Today, Mammoet has an automated invoice processing solution in place thanks to Ricoh, ReadSoft and CTAC, who joined forces to offer a solution that integrates perfectly with the SAP ERP system.

Steverink says “The SAP system is the lifeblood of our business. The condition for additional solutions like this is seamless integration with SAP, so we needn’t worry about it.”

An automatic process – from scanning to payment
All invoices arriving at Mammoet’s accounts payable department are scanned and ReadSoft’s software automatically extracts the key information, validates it, and checks that the data seems reasonable (supplier, sum, due date, VAT amount, purchase order etc). If everything is correct, the captured information is automatically transferred into Mammoet’s SAP system for coding, authorization and approval.

Mammoet also uses ReadSoft‘s statistics tool that provides full control of the invoice capture process. “With this tool, we can see where the process needs to optimized and we can quickly correct any errors” says Steverink.

In SAP, the solution checks if the invoice matches the purchase order. Any discrepancies are detected and presented to the appropriate user. If everything is correct, the invoice is automatically sent for approval, and eventually posted for payment.

Global implementation
“Invoices from our local offices worldwide are processed with ReadSoft’s software at the central headquarters. When the data has been checked, it is automatically transferred to the SAP system, where the payment is handled by our local staff. After a worldwide implementation of all necessary software, we can process all invoices from our local offices even without adding extra people.”

Increased control, knowledge and cost awareness
“The whole process is much faster, more efficient and we have much more control” says Steverink. “Previously we often did not even know how much we paid for something, but now we have full control. And that has made us very cost-aware. Automating the invoice process has in many aspects been a blessing for Mammoet!”

http://www.anp.se

This article is from E-invoicing Platform. Read the original post at: Accounts Payable automation gives Mammoet control of the complete process.

ReadSoft partner Ricoh Netherlands is a supplier of IT and document solutions. Thanks to the key role played by Ricoh in the rapid development of the global office, the company has in only twenty years, become the market leader in sustainable document solutions.

With 108,500 employees and offices in over 50 countries, the Ricoh Group currently has one of the largest sales and service networks in the industry.

To learn more about the partnership between Ricoh and ReadSoft, we had a chat with Theo van Zalen, Business Manager Managed Services at Ricoh Netherlands. Theo has been with Ricoh for almost 15 years and has been a key enabler of the company’s success. In his current role, Theo is responsible for all solution selling with a focus on establishing strong, successful partnerships to further develop the business.

For how long have Ricoh and ReadSoft been partners?
We have been partners for many years. In the beginning we worked together with the ReadSoft head office in Sweden, which was the start of a good relationship. In 2008, ReadSoft established a Benelux subsidiary, and since then we’ve been working with the local team, which is easier because we’re closer to each other and speak the same language, so now our relationship with ReadSoft is even stronger.

What types of deals do you do together?
The deals we do together with ReadSoft typically involve automation of invoice processing (with and without ERP integrations), Human Resources document processing, case management, etc. The ReadSoft products we work with are DOCUMENTS, INVOICES, FORMS, INVOICE COCKPIT and INVOICEIT.

What’s it like to work with ReadSoft?
Our relationship is based on trust, a strong network on all levels and the ability to make each other successful. A partnership needs time to mature and develop, you need to keep investing and you need the right people to understand and lead the way.

What are your partnership plans for the future?
Ricoh will keep focusing on a selection of strong partner relationships, of which ReadSoft is one. We choose to partner with companies that complement Ricoh on multiple levels to achieve a combination of best-in-class, high-value solutions. Examples of such combinations are Ricoh-ReadSoft-CTAC and Ricoh-ReadSoft-4apps Group. To further build these relationships has a very strong focus within Ricoh.

www.ricoh.nl

This article is from E-invoicing Platform. Read the original post at: Ricoh and ReadSoft offer best-in-class solutions.

The Electronic Invoicing Application service in Turkey has started by the publication of Tax Procedural Law (Order No. 397) in March 5, 2010. The Presidency of Revenue Administration Office of Tax Authority regulates the e-invoicing system.

Users benefit from e-billing application by:
- sending e-invoices,
- receiving e-invoices,
- downloading the e-invoices into their computer,
- presenting electronic media stored in their computer when requested.
The E-State e-invoicing application has a B2B scope. Users can access the system by integration their accounting system or via an Internet Portal  Those users with sufficient computing capacity can connect their own data processing (CRM, billing accounting) directly (server to server) to the central system and must use the determined standards of e-billing application. Those companies which do not have adequate infrastructure can access the system through a portal. That prtal is web application which hosts and serves basic functions.
Once the accounts are activated the users will be able to log-on to the e-billing Portal and be able to send and receive e-invoices.

Links related to e-invoicing in Turkey:
http://www.efatura.gov.tr/
http://mm.kamusm.gov.tr/

This article is from E-invoicing Platform. Read the original post at: E-invoicing begins to show benefits in Turkey.

Email usage continues to increase globally. Although growth rates vary from region to region, this increase goes hand in hand with the increased use of social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

Nielsen published a study which found that consumers of social media were also the highest consumers of email (see the industry trends banner which clearly illustrates this point). In the United States, email usage grew by 21% in 2009 and social media by 31% during the same period.

Billing portals continue to deliver poor ROI

“It would seem logical that people would also visit more web portals if they continue to increase their time spent on social networking sites,” says Nicola Els, Head of eBilling at Striata.

Web portals can provide a customer with a wealth of information that enables online analysis of billing, payment, historical information such as previous month’s bills and self service options. “The fundamental problem with accessing this kind of information online is the initial registration process required, along with the need to enter a username and password each time you visit the portal,” continues Els. “One or two portals seem manageable, but once you translate all of your monthly bills to portals you end up with a large amount of URL’s, usernames, passwords and navigations on each site to wade through – not to mention remembering to view these bills each month. This is one of the compelling reasons why companies do not achieve a ROI when trying to convert paper based customers to portal registrants.”

Email delivery drives faster payment

How can this process be simplified, yet still provide value for the customer and how can the supplier drive faster payments and improve cash flow?

According to Els it is important to remember that people are inherently lazy and tend to react better to information that is pushed to them. Emailing an interactive eBill attachment to a customer and enabling them to view, sort, analyze, query and submit payment from within this secure email attachment is first prize. All required action can be performed from within the bill, thereby retaining the customers attention and making the call to action i.e. payment, available in one click.

Supporters of portal billing argue that the majority of email sent to inboxes is spam yet they email bill notifications to their users. Recently Symantec released statistics indicating that 92% of email is spam. However spam filters are catching 90% of this leaving very little in the inbox. As inboxes become more intelligent, as in the case of Gmail’s priority inbox, spam email communications are now being pushed to the bottom of the queue. Furthermore, ISP’s are continually improving their criteria regulating what mail is allowed to land in the consumer’s inbox, before the inbox even starts it’s intelligent (algorithm driven) work.

“Sending bulk communications like eBills from supplier to customer is not a simple job, there is much to be considered regarding deliverability and authentication. Striata has the necessary specialists and technology to cater for these requirements. We believe that every message counts and are able to boast high delivery rates that ensure our client’s emails penetrate their customer’s inbox,” says Els.

Increase your email reach through social media

Interactivity on marketing communications has continued to increase with the introduction of social media sharing options on these emails. GetResponse’s E-mail marketing and social media integration report suggests that this is a worthwhile tactic for increasing email reach. The study of 500 million emails showed that including three or more social sharing icons increased average click-through rates from 7.2 per cent to 11.2 per cent.

Even with alleged high spam rates many well known brands across industries such as banking and finance, telecommunications, utilities and insurance continue to send email communications, in the form of marketing and statements, to their customers. This is an obvious translation that email is still being read and continues to provide a valuable channel of communication to the customer and this is unlikely to change in the near future as they continue to enjoy the interactivity available on these communications.

www.striata.com

This article is from E-invoicing Platform. Read the original post at: Why email is still the strongest medium for online billing.

This article is part of the co-author series of the EEI Platform. It was originally posted on

The case for electronic invoicing is compelling – why would an organization that has invests millions – sometimes tens of millions – of dollars on a finance system want to operate a paper based process in the 21st century? But it’s not as easy as that – especially for global organizations. The wide variety of legislation around the globe creates a Tower of Babel for those attempting to implement electronic invoicing on a large scale. But the situation is beginning to evolve in a very positive way – and absolutely not in a way I would have predicted a few years ago. The electronic invoice is about to die on its feet leaving the door wide open for the new pretender to the AP automation throne – the new electronic invoice.

Electronic Invoicing – How Did We Get Here?

Recall how electronic invoicing evolved. EDI in 1990’s never took off. The concept was great and simple. Don’t use paper. Instead exchange electronic messages between businesses. But it was proprietary and costly and even when it embraced the internet, the standards were archaic and a hassle to maintain. There were some good things about EDI. Guaranteed delivery and proof of authenticity made it easy for tax authorities to accept it and it was the tax authorities that provided the biggest hurdle for internet based electronic invoicing.

This is where OB10 found a niche. With its VISA heritage, OB10 recognized the importance of securing approval from the law makers in the countries of their clients and they were rapidly successful in developing an internet based – non standards based – pure electronic invoice offering by ensuring that the invoice would be legally acceptable. But something was happening in parallel that was in many ways a much easier sale.

Superficial electronic invoicing

The concept of electronic invoicing – like purchasing cards – was always a bit difficult to explain. I’ve never quite understood why and it was disappointing to see many organisations checking the electronic invoicing box by using soft copy invoices – either sent as pdf or scanning paper invoices.  This is superficial electronic invoicing. It completely misses the point. Or at least, it did.

Changing world

The world has changed. While we’ve been concentrating on the internet and social media, the power and application of computers has continued to grow such that the fundamental assumptions that were safe ten years ago are no longer safe. We used to believe that for one computer to talk to another, they need to speak in computer language – pass non-human readable electronic messages to each other. That’s why the true electronic invoice was an electronic message – it met a strict and exact standard with predefined fields and structure. But today scanning and data capture technology is so sophisticated you can wave a screwed up, coffee stained, handwritten restaurant receipt at a good scanner and it will perform a 3 way match with you GRN and P.O. in an instant.

OK, I exaggerate, but you get my drift. Today, there is simply no need to generate an electronic invoice message. All that’s needed is an image of a traditional paper invoice whether that’s scanned from a paper original or never rendered in paper in the first place.

Where does this put OB10 and Ariba? If computers today can interpret reliably pieces of paper, cXML invoices are pointless aren’t they? Why go to your suppliers and ask them to pay for the privilege of sending you electronic invoices in yet another different format?

The electronic invoice as we know it dead. Not because it’s pointless – but because there is simply no need to do the transformation from human readable to electronic. The future for e-invoicing is bright and it looks exactly like it did before e-invoicing.

Souce: Purchasinginsight.com

This article is from E-invoicing Platform. Read the original post at: e-Invoicing is Dead, Long Live Electronic Invoicing.

De facto standard

Internationalization starting at SIBOS
On the world’s premier payments congress SIBOS AcceptEmail announces the advent of her international platform. In support of the companies’ expansion, AcceptEmail installed an Advisory Board with Tobias Walraven as first member. The Advisory Board assists the management in strategic decision making and with the internationalization of the company.

Founder of SNT Group
Tobias Walraven was as entrepreneur the founder of SNT Group NV, until December 2004 an international and listed service provider focusing on CRM. Tobias Walraven was as founder and chairman of the board / CEO involved with SNT for almost twenty years. Tobias Walraven is involved in a large number of young companies that are involved in new applications for communication.

Peter Kwakernaak, CEO of AcceptEmail, is glad to have Tobias on board: “we are honored and enthusiastic that an experienced entrepreneur such as Tobias Walraven wants to assist our company in her further growth. His knowledge and experience are very valuable to us”.

Tobias Walraven comments: “AcceptEmail is a very effective and scalable innovation that provides much added value to both receivers and billers in customer service and reducing the costs of invoicing and credit management. I am eager to help bringing this successful concept further to the market”.

www.acceptemail.com

This article is from E-invoicing Platform. Read the original post at: Tobias Walraven strengthens AcceptEmail team.

“The key words are convenience of the solution and simplicity of the joining procedure. It takes 5 minutes over the web for a company to start sending and receiving invoices electronically. E-Invoicing Centre Ltd has become Estonian´s largest service provider in B2B customer segment,” said Head on Infologistics division Toomas Turk.

Manager of E-Invoicing Centre Ltd Margus Tammeraja said that the underlying reason for rapid growth has been the wide range of service packages and competitive pricing. With the right package, the solution is beneficial both for sole traders and big enterprises:

“The E-Invoicing Centre solution is used, among others, by Estonian Post, public schools, Kuresaare, Saue and Jogeva municipalities. State authorities are seriously considering sending and receiving e-invoices in order to increase efficiency.”

An E-invoice is not a PDF invoice sent by e-mail but an XML-bill which conforms to standards set by the Estonian Banking Association which can be handled electronically by the recipient – for example direct to approval process and to import into an accounting programme.

E-Invoicing Centre Ltd is a subsidiary of Estonian Post. The shareholders are AS Webmedia and E-Bookkeeping OU.

Source: EESTI Post

This article is from E-invoicing Platform. Read the original post at: Exchange of e-invoices between companies is growing rapidly in Estonia.

ComReg recognises the desire by providers of electronic communications services to move their customers to e-billing and understands the potential benefits accruing from increased take-up of e-billing (including cost and environmental benefits). ComReg also recognises the desire by some consumers of electronic communications services to move to e-billing. However, as previously set out, ComReg is of the view that any move to e-billing should take full account of, and safeguard, the legitimate preferences and interests of consumers and comply fully with licence and other applicable legal requirements.

ComReg proposes to commence a consultation process on the issue of e-billing in November 2010, which will provide an opportunity for all stakeholders to state their views on this issue. ComReg would note, however, that in most cases where regulations with respect to billing apply, an e-bill is permitted where positive consumer consent is obtained, and that a paper bill is to be provided, as standard, where such consumer consent is not obtained.

ComReg looks forward to working collaboratively with all stakeholders towards developing a policy that both meets the legal obligations of providers of electronic communications services with respect to e-billing, and addresses the legitimate concerns of consumers of electronic communications services.

Source: comreg.ie

This article is from E-invoicing Platform. Read the original post at: ComReg notifies O2 of non-compliance with respect to e-billing.

My business can do without online invoicing and billing

There has been a rapid increase in the number of companies switching to online invoicing and there are enough evidences to prove it. A study in the year 2002 reveals, payment of more than 500 invoices was made online and in 2007 the figure made a high jump with the number increased to 3.6 billion, an increase of 620%. With such a stupendous growth of online invoicing, the companies which are still adamant to follow the traditional practice of business and refuse to follow the online business are certain to suffer a heavy set-back.

Little or no impact on invoicing cost of online invoicing

With the modernization of time, the commerce has also been transformed and the advent of e-commerce has completely changed the outlook of business world and the customers. Today, customers require fast and advanced services than in the past. They have multiple options which give them an opportunity to switch from a poor service to a better service. They are quick and more conscious now. Hence, it is just a misconception that customers do not entertain invoice online but nearly 44% of the users showed their interest in online invoicing.

Online invoicing software and application are complicated

Most of the companies also believe this misconception that online invoice software would unnecessarily invite lot of hassles since it is complicated. However, it is just the other way round. Online software is simpler, faster and also cheaper than manual bills and invoices which are time consuming and cost you hefty. As far as online invoice is concerned, you can begin sending invoices immediately after you have signed up in any invoicing application.

Online invoicing will do no good to improve ROI

This is another myth that implanting online invoicing would be futile to improve ROI. In fact, your clients can enjoy accessing billing history and details at any hour (24*7) and you are more likely to get your payment on time with no delays.

Source: http://creativeoverflow.net

This article is from E-invoicing Platform. Read the original post at: Misconceptions faced by businesses regarding online invoicing.

Therefore, the eProcurement Forum, the community of eProcurement experts hosted by the ePractice portal, has gathered and analysed the key activities that have an impact on the development of electronic public procurement in Europe.

These efforts resulted in the creation of a dynamic map of these initiatives, which is provided to all the members of the eProcurement Forum and to any other expert interested in it. The expected effect is to make all the eProcurement stakeholders aware of what is happening in the European scenario and provide a tool for the easy identification of “who is doing what”.

The ‘eProcurement Map’ serves as a dynamic picture of various projects, initiatives or communities, having different targets, audiences or approaches to eProcurement.

The present version is an update of the third map edition and introduces new initiatives and documents. Any comments, suggestions or contribution should be sent to eprocurement@epractice.eu.

The document consists of three main sections:

• Section 2: Map of the activities, where all the activities have been described providing synthetic information on objectives, approach and contacts;
• Section 3: Available studies, proposing a selection of the available results of these activities and of the reference documents produced by the European Commission;
• Section 4: Relevant Legal Acts, proposing the most recent legal acts issued at European level.

Number of pages: 41

Read the eProcurement Map, 4th edition here

Related ePractice Publications:
ePractice Library :EU: The eProcurement map
ePractice Library :EU: The eProcurement map – Second edition
ePractice Library: EU: The eProcurement map – Third edition

Source: ePractice

This article is from E-invoicing Platform. Read the original post at: Fourth edition of the eProcurement Map published.

ReadSoft signs invoice processing agreement worth 700,000 USD with global auto parts company: http://bit.ly/dBJ9HJ
15-10-2010 09:22:14

Newest Brazil’s e-invoicing requirements total mores than 200 pages!! Via @krbenedict on: http://bit.ly/alPu2O and http://bit.ly/dCG8KQ
14-10-2010 22:01:33

Pitney Bowes developed and just demonstrated a killer #einvoicing/e-everything universal printer driver. No more standardisation issues!!
14-10-2010 10:56:26

Vodafone Ireland has made online billing the default option for all new domestic customers, who now have to pay EUR2 for each paper bill!!
13-10-2010 13:01:54

The majority of O2 Ireland’s domestic customers have been switched to online billing: http://bit.ly/cSHAKO
13-10-2010 13:00:19

Kick-Off meeting of “Core Cross Industry Invoice European Message Implementation Guideline” project. Subscribe to: adechamps@cencenelec.eu
13-10-2010 11:07:50

RT @hippebrun: 300-400 million invoices are exchanged every year in Switzerland. Government focus on the role as market participant rat …
12-10-2010 14:52:15

Nice comparison of paper invoicing, e-invoicing and advanced e-invoicing by @purchaseinsight: http://bit.ly/9CLczf
12-10-2010 14:51:26

RT @christianlanng “Controls in place for paper should be sufficient for e-invoicing (equal treatment” #sensible #EU #einvoicing
11-10-2010 16:54:47

RT @hippebrun “Businesses across Europe can save 240bn EUR over 6 years” Gary Wilkinson, EC DG Taxation and Customs Union, #einvoicing
11-10-2010 16:53:03

New initiative launches to disrupt the entire financial system #TradeShift #MortenLund: http://bit.ly/a8IDjb
11-10-2010 16:21:05

RT @AndreCasterman: @einvoicing at #Sibos, we’ll have 5,000 Payments, Cash Management and Trade delegates who all need to understand #ei …
8-10-2010 17:30:37

RT @ExtendAP: A recent survey by IOMA attributes more than 96% of all invoice processing time to keying data from paper.
7-10-2010 10:59:46

RT @Striata: The future of eBilling – what are the trends? http://striata.com/nf95
7-10-2010 10:55:54

This article is from E-invoicing Platform. Read the original post at: Twitterupdate week 40 + 41.

Legal departments: unless you have a mature, well-fed matter management system or currently deploy project management discipline to your legal matters, then you don’t need e-invoicing. There would be no context for it. Don’t get me wrong; you will need it eventually, it is just not where you start in the process of bettering your legal department. Rather, it is the capstone.

At least in companies smaller than $10 billion in revenue, we have found that there are greater needs.

Using Maslow’s hierarchy of needs as a metaphor, e-invoicing equates to esteem or self-actualization when most legal departments need to address their physiological needs first, like tracking matters consistently, budgeting, participating in ongoing assessments and developing solid case plans.

The good news is that even if you implement e-invoicing before doing this other stuff, you will see savings; as much as 10% of your current legal spend! But you don’t make anything else about your legal department better. And you don’t get better outcomes out of your legal projects. And you don’t understand the risk facing your organization any better.

This is where the “legal trinity” of assessing the situation (matter or case or project), creating a plan and then budgeting come into play. If you put in these building blocks first, and implement light project management discipline in your legal departments, layering e-invoicing on top will yield you greater long-term benefits. Things will be cheaper, but also better and faster.

Source: Onit

This article is from E-invoicing Platform. Read the original post at: Blog: E-invoicing? You Don’t Need No Stinking E-invoicing!.

By Joe Fox, Ariba

There have been a number of key changes in the B2B eCommerce Software Markets over the last 5 years and eInvoicing is one of the new and fastest growing spaces.  Ariba’s Financial Solutions including Invoice Management, Payment Management and Working Capital Manager are leading the way toward removing paper from the day today financial process.

Accounts Receivable initiates almost all paper invoices today and many of these organizations are looking for ways to convert completely to paperless invoice processing.  Platforms like the Ariba Network are proven to provide small, medium and large suppliers the ability to move quickly off of paper invoice processing.

There are a number of key factors driving this rapid change in the eInvoice market.

1. Buyer Demand – Many of our suppliers have been asked by their customers to adopt an eInvoice policy when sending request for payment

2. Market Demand – The competitive nature of the current global market is causing suppliers to adopt eInvoice to better compete and to stand out in an RFP or sourcing exercise.  Saying you are Ariba Ready for eInvoicing is the best way to stand out.

3. Cost Savings – Suppliers are finding their cost per invoice is droping by greater than 50%

4. Acceleration of Cash – Cash is king and not only are Suppliers being paid faster but they are gaining new ways to accelerate collection of cash directly tied to the value of eInvoicing.  With Ariba they can also leverage discount management and receivables auctioning with The Receivables Exchange, to open up additional sources of capital.

It is becoming clear that the sellers desire to meet the needs of their customers and many of the other above value drivers is creating a fast growing set of solution providers.  All you need to do is go to google and type in search for eInvoice and you get eleven companies paying for placement.  Many of which noone has heard of in the past.  Ask the analysts what they think of eInvoicing and they quickly get into the challenges for suppliers to navigate the large number of offerings and the needs of their customers.

It’s important when looking at an eInvoice solution as a large buying organization to think about the fact that your seller is probably more motivated to move to eInvoicing than you are and that your solution platform and approach you pick for removing paper processing should take into consideration not only the value drivers for the suppliers but the operational needs of the suppliers.  One good example of how Ariba provides value to the seller is our PO-FLIP trademarked feature which makes it fast for a seller to generate an accurate invoice and to track invoices to the originating purchase order.

It’s really important as you choose how you respond to your Sellers request for eInvoice that you consider how your Procurement organization and Operational groups want to work with the Sellers.  Many decentralized Procurement groups own the relationships with the Sellers and can help you navigate the increasing requests that Sellers are making to move to paperless processing.

Who are the players in the eInvoice Space?  Here is a sampling.

EDI VAN’s:

- Sterling, www.sterlingcommerce.com, http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=Sterling+commerce&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq=&gs_rfai=

- GXS, www.gxs.com, http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=GXS&aq=f&aqi=g2g-s1g4g-s1g2&aql=&oq=&gs_rfai=

- and others in EDI solution space that just allow sending of a document but with no other compelling features

Invoice Only Providers:

- OB10, allows suppliers to send invoices, www.ob10.com, http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=OB10&aq=f&aqi=g10c1&aql=&oq=&gs_rfai=

- Basware, buyer side tools set that can take eInvoices from other networks, www.basware.com, http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=Basware&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq=&gs_rfai=

- Transcepta, great group of guys who allow sellers to more easily create invoices, www.transcepta.com, http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=Transcepta&aq=f&aqi=g10&aql=&oq=&gs_rfai=

- JPMC Xign, an early provider of electronic invoice with much more focus now on Pcard opportunities. www.xign.net , http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=Xign&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq=&gs_rfai=

- Bottomline, focused on payment but some basic invoice, www.bottomline.com, http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&source=hp&q=Bottomline&aq=f&aqi=g10&aql=&oq=&gs_rfai=C0yt_gu2cTNmZD4W8NqL3wOYIAAAAqgQFT9DSYhw

- QuickBooksOnline, small supplier capabilities, www.quickbooksonline.com, http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&source=hp&q=Quickbooks+Online&aq=f&aqi=n1g10a1&aql=&oq=&gs_rfai=CO4atRu6cTPi-F4yYoASi0d3_CgAAAKoEBU_QNZVf
I encourage you to talk to your suppliers to discuss what platforms they use, where they get value and what their needs are.  It is becoming very clear that Sellers are driving the adoption of eInvoice globally.  China, India, Japan and other Eastern Regions are also quickly moving away from paper.

This article is from E-invoicing Platform. Read the original post at: Opinion: Sellers are Driving eInvoice Market Growth.

Take a look at the video to see how NIKE was able to:

- Establish and enforce best practice term policies
- Maintain and extend days payable outstanding (DPO)
- Maximize discount opportunities with improved spend segmentation
- Remove risk from your supply chain

Watch this video here to learn how you can achieve your working capital objectives like NIKE.

www.ariba.com

This article is from E-invoicing Platform. Read the original post at: Nike: Optimizing Working Capital Through AP Automation.

This article is the second part of Paul Boag’s series about common problems and difficulties that occur in in-house Web teams working in large companies. The series explains ways to to improve how your team is perceived within your organization, overcome politics and problem people, ensure that a project gets approval and deliver work within scope and on time.

Feel free to check part 1 of the article as well.

This article is from E-invoicing Platform. Read the original post at: Fight The System: Battling Bureaucracy II.

According to a new white paper from Esker, a company focusing on reducing paper use in businesses, SaaS can help companies eliminate a large chunk of their paper use, specifically for invoices, thus saving on resources.

A survey conducted by the firm found that 58 per cent of invoices still trade hands in paper format, while accounting departments spend 30 per cent of their time processing the paper requests. Deploying SaaS solutions for invoicing can save time in the workplace, while also lessening the impact on the environment by doing away with paper use.

According to the research, about four in every five businesses indicated they were keen to adopt a SaaS solution to improve their performance in this area.

“This European study, conducted in France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the UK, shows us that European companies are not necessarily aware of all the productivity losses due to manual vendor invoice processing,” said Franck Nassah, managing consultant for IDC France, which helped conduct the survey.

“However, these companies start to identify most of the benefits vendor invoice automation can bring to them. They are ready to invest in a SaaS solution which will enable them to keep implementation costs down and manage their investment,” he added.

Read the report HERE

www.rackspace.co.uk

This article is from E-invoicing Platform. Read the original post at: SaaS-based vendor invoice automation solutions gain traction in Europe.

“If you work as part of an in-house Web team, you have my sympathy. If that in-house team is within a large organization, then doubly so. Being part of an in-house Web team sucks. Trust me, I know. I worked at IBM for three years and now spend most of my days working alongside battle-weary internal teams.”

Read the entire article HERE
(Tip: read it from the e-invoicing perspective)

This article is from E-invoicing Platform. Read the original post at: Fight The System: Battling Bureaucracy.

• What challenges are organizations facing when it comes to manual invoice and payment management processes?
• What factors are driving the migration from paper invoices to electronic methods? What benefits does eInvoicing deliver?
• In spite of the widespread availability of eInvoicing solutions and their tangible benefits, why are more than half of all B2B invoices traded in paper format?
• What barriers are hindering further adoption of eInvoicing and how can they be overcome?
• What related developments in the procure-to-pay space are impacting the growth of electronic invoicing? Where does eInvoicing fit in a broader P2P automation roadmap?
• What are the functional components of an eInvoicing solution? Who are the key players in this space? What solution functionality is available from these technology vendors?
• What are some of the best practices innovator companies are following in order to streamline their invoice and payment management processes?
  .
  Read the entire report here

This article is from E-invoicing Platform. Read the original post at: Electronic Invoice Management: Getting Rid of Paper from the Source.

Ariba is open to accelerate the production of a country guide (new or updated) to assist any customer rollout their solution into any country where we believe we have a paperless solution.  Unlike some competitors, there are no pre-conditions or volume commitments required for Ariba to research a country and obtain this kind of information via the local KPMG expert.  This update serves as another example of Ariba’s and our partners’ commitment to spreading the adoption of paperless e-Invoicing globally!

In general, Poland is a very straight forward VAT country with the exception of the following differences:

* Poland requires that “Faktura VAT”  (Tax Invoice) in Polish language be included in the invoice.
* Poland requires that “FAKTURA KORYGUJACA” or “KOREKTA” be include in a credit memo.
* Poland requires that “Total invoice amount” be written in digits and in words.
* Poland has defined requirements for 4 types of credit memos

See Ariba’s Country Guide for more details on how the Ariba solution maps to the Polish requirements.

If you are interested in e-Invoicing in Poland, please contact your Ariba representative for the latest version of Ariba’s Country Guide.

http://exchange.ariba.com/community/solutions/finance/blog/tags/einvoice

This article is from E-invoicing Platform. Read the original post at: Ariba: paperless e-Invoicing in Poland.

The revised 2010 Tax Compliance Country Guide includes anew chapter for Austria.  Our strategy with respect to country guide production is to ensure that Ariba has independent verification for each of the countries for which we believe we have a paperless compliant solution.  As you may have noticed, the cadence of our country guide production continues to increase as we work to meet this goal.

From a compliance and risk mangement standpoint, the strength of the Ariba solution in Austria is very similar to other European countries;  it’s that we have the right end-to-end controls from enrollment through preparation, receipt, and processing of invoice data.

Read the entire article here

This article is from E-invoicing Platform. Read the original post at: Paperless e-Invoicing by Ariba in Austria.

Whilst the efficiency of electronic communication is clear and initiatives to reduce waste are to be encouraged, the Two Sides organisation, which exists to explore the Myths and Facts concerning the sustainability of Print and Paper, and has members spanning the whole Graphic Communications Value Chain, is concerned that incorrect and damaging impressions are being given if ‘go paperless’ initiatives are promoted as ‘green’ or seek to gain credibility by purporting to aid sustainability at the expense of the print and paper industry.

It is increasingly clear that electronic communication and in particular the energy requirements of the increasing worldwide network of servers which are necessary to store all the information needed for immediate access, has a significant and increasing carbon footprint. Electronic document storage must be recognised as delivering efficiency but not sustainability. In the UK it has been suggested that PC’s and servers may consume up to 50% of household energy requirements in the next 10 years. Greenpeace has reported that electronic waste is the fastest growing waste stream and there are extremely serious disposal costs emerging.

All those who encourage customers to switch to e-billing, or any other form of electronic communication, largely to reduce costs, should re-examine their messages as it is certainly questionable whether e-billing or e-communication has a lower carbon footprint. In fact, with all the environmental costs of electronic communication and with many customers printing out their bills at home for reference, (a recent study has assumed this between 10% and 30 % depending upon whether you are a business or private consumer), at a possible higher environmental cost than a centrally produced and distributed bill, print and paper may well be the environmentally sustainable way to communicate.

Paper is a renewable and recyclable product that, if responsibly produced and consumed, is an environmentally sustainable media. It is often surprising to learn that in Europe, where 93% of our paper comes from, the area of forest has grown by 30% since 1950 and is increasing at a rate of 1.5 million football pitches every year

And with 55% of the worldwide forest harvest being consumed for fuel and 34% for construction and other uses, only 11% is actually directly used for making paper

So, if your organisation is using messages that e-billing, or any other form of electronic communication, is more environmentally friendly than traditional print and paper, please check that you have not only calculated your own savings but also accurately assessed and calculated the downstream consequential costs.

Misleading environmental claims are not only increasingly being examined by regulators but jeopardise the livelihood of the many thousands of people employed in the Graphic Communications Value Chain.

It is encouraging that responsible organisations are now thinking carefully about the statements they make and ensuring that they are not simply repeating old misconceptions.

Martyn Eustace
Two Sides

www.twosides.info

This article is from E-invoicing Platform. Read the original post at: A different vision on online billing and e-communication.

Check out these 23 invoicing applications that may just help you out!

Click here for the apps

This article is from E-invoicing Platform. Read the original post at: Get Paid: 23 useful invoicing applications.

This paper provides a specific framework and tools that any organization can use to minimize the decision time, optimize cross-functional buy-in, and maximize the likelihood of making the right eProcurement solution decision.

Download this paper, which provides a specific framework and tools to minimize the decision time and maximize the likelihood of making the right eProcurement solution decision.

Key topics featured include:

- Identifying stakeholder initiatives
- Defining tactical requirements
- Outlining selection criteria
- Gaining corporate buy-in
- A quick reference checklist

www.ariba.com

This article is from E-invoicing Platform. Read the original post at: Ariba: Selecting the right eProcurement solution.

Read more…

This article is from E-invoicing Platform. Read the original post at: “3-corner model – a problem on our hands”, EU Expert Group Chair states.

Despite encouraging signs, there’s uncertainty about the underlying strength of the economy’s recovery. And people seem equally cautious about long-term demand.

How should you adjust your sourcing strategies to compensate for that? Replay this webinar to find out.

You’ll learn how and why you should be closely examining certain market dynamics before launching any contract renegotiation or sourcing initiative. And listen closely as Ariba’s global category management team spotlights the indirect categories that you should be sourcing today.

Download this on-demand webinar to learn how you can drive more value from contract management, build relationships and creditability with suppliers, and measure your success.

Download and watch the Ariba webinar here

This article is from E-invoicing Platform. Read the original post at: Ariba Sourcing Webinar for the European market.

B

Examining the AP departments’ performance in terms of how many invoices each AP employee processed annually, the study measured the gulf between best and worst performing AP functions to determine what defines AP invoice processing excellence. The findings revealed a significant disparity between those accounts payable departments that are still relying on paper-based processes and those organizations that have adopted automated processes and e-invoicing.
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47 percent of the organizations surveyed still receive more than half of their invoices in paper form which leads to increased errors, delays and costs resulting from manual processes. According to the study, “the worst-performing AP departments don’t seem to realize how far they lag behind their peers. In contrast, 60% of those in the top quartile saw further scope for improvement. The least-efficient departments can’t move forward until they realize just how far they lag behind their peers.”

Combining invoice automation with e-invoicing and eProcurement within organizations was shown by the research to double the chances of achieving AP invoice processing excellence and maximize straight-through processing (STP).  Eliminating human intervention in the invoice handling and approval process cuts manual data capture tasks such as document scanning and data entry, thus not only increasing the speed of the process but also providing cost-savings within the business. By implementing purchase-to-pay solutions, organizations can gain control and visibility over finance and procurement processes and improve overall process performance.

The integration of e-invoicing and eProcurement works in parallel with the need to centralize responsibility in accounts payable departments to enable process improvements. Finance managers with pan-division responsibility were found to be more able to invest in better technology and processes than their colleagues operating at BU level. Persuading suppliers to send invoices electronically and offering them incentives for e-invoicing was also found to correlate strongly with excellent performance.  18 percent of the companies surveyed were processing more than 40,000 invoices annually per full time equivalent (FTE), while 25 percent of respondents needed one FTE for every 4,000 invoices or less per year.

“Organizations are paying dearly for poorly performing processes, with each invoice costing more than USD 50 to process at the organizations in the poorest performing quartile,” said Steve Muddiman, SVP at Basware. “We believe these study findings reflect the evidence we have seen in our own customer base. Integrated purchase-to-pay process combined with best practices such departmental collaboration between finance and procurement enable organizations to transform their AP departments to top performers, delivering cost savings and ultimately boosting the bottom line.”

To download the study, please visit: www.basware.com/forrester-report

¹“Finance And Procurement Work Together To Achieve AP Invoice Processing Excellence. AP Departments That Combine Technology With Best Practices Are Most Likely To Get Top Results”, A commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of Basware, April 2010.
²In this study, Forrester conducted an online survey of 100 large organizations in the US, the UK and France.

About Basware
Basware is the global leader in purchase-to-pay solutions with more than 1,500 customers and 1,000,000 users in over 50 countries around the world. With Basware, organizations can reduce the cost of buying and paying for goods and services and gain visibility and control of their entire spending process by automating manual processes, from sourcing, contract management,  purchasing and supplier collaboration to invoice automation.  Basware solutions and services enable substantial cost reductions across businesses and deliver value by providing compliance and control, as well as fast return on investment. The solutions are distributed and implemented, either on site or as a service, in Europe, the US, and Asia-Pacific through an extensive network of Basware offices and business partners. www.basware.com

This article is from E-invoicing Platform. Read the original post at: Combining e-invoicing and eProcurement doubles chances for AP invoice processing excellence.

The Dutch project on e-Invoicing  by the Ministry of Economic Affairs (EZ) started in 2008. The aim of this project was to introduce electronic invoicing to the government. Concerned citizens wonder if e-invoicing does take up more energy than paper invoices.
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Several international studies have been set up to take a closer look at the use of energy by e-invoicing. The fact that in other countries a significant beneficial effect is found for e-billing does not mean that this automatically counts for the Netherlands.
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The Ministry of Economic Affairs has asked TNO to make a calculation of direct and indirect impacts on energy consumption and CO2 emissions. This calculation is made in a transition situation from a chain with 100% of paper invoices to a chain with 100% e-invoices. Analysis shows that paper invoices use up nearly two times more energy and 50% more CO2 emissions than digital invoices.

Take a look at the presentation by Paula van Hoorik, Senior Consultant, TNO

This article is from E-invoicing Platform. Read the original post at: Dutch Technology agency TNO: survey on e-invoicing.

The new directive sets out to ensure the acceptance by tax authorities of e-invoices under the same conditions as for paper invoices, and to remove legal obstacles to the transmission and storage of e-invoices.

It also comprises measures to help tax authorities ensure that tax is paid so as to better tackle VAT fraud. These include establishing deadlines for the issuance of invoices, thus enabling speedier exchange of information on intra-EU supplies of goods and services.
Current EU provisions on VAT invoicing have led to a less-than-harmonised set of rules, on account of the many options that remain available to the member states. The aims of current provisions have therefore not been fully met.

Furthermore, compliance with regulatory requirements has hindered the take-up of technologies that are necessary for the development of e-invoicing. The Commission estimates potential annual cost savings for businesses at up to EUR 18 billion if obstacles to e-invoicing in VAT rules were to be removed.

Read all about it here

This article is from E-invoicing Platform. Read the original post at: Best read: European Council adopts simplified rules for VAT invoicing.

This analysis of E-Invoicing & E-Billing provides you with the most up to date and comprehensive analysis of the top 67 companies operating the market.

There’s a catch though, you’d have to invest GBP 350,- to :
1) benchmark their business’s financial performance,
2) identify under performing companies for acquisition
3) seek out successful companies to partner or do business with
4) understand the key movers and shakers in today’s market.

The report incorporates:

• a 5 year performance appraisal using our model
• an instant graphical and written analysis that tells you everything you need to know about that company and its strengths and weaknesses
• an individual valuation of detailing what it is currently worth
• an Acquisition Rating´ on outlining its attractiveness as a company to acquire,
• a ´future year´ outlining the steps needed to improve its health and increase its value.

In addition, the report also includes a 100 page overview of the latest developments in the market including: a 10 year trend analysis detailing changes in the market, a list of exceptional performers in over 15 categories and a breakdown of the industry’s KPI’s from sales growth to profitability, etc.

Click HERE for report details.

Source: companiesandmarkets.com

This article is from E-invoicing Platform. Read the original post at: UK E-Invoicing and E-Billing Market Study – new market report and analysis released.

More than 350 E-Invoicing specialists and end-users from more than 30 countries are expected at the summit, which takes place in Munich from 11th to 12th October 2010. Amongst the exhibitors are six members of the EEI Platform: Accounting Plaza, Accountis, Basware, Certipost, StreamServe and Tieto.

Developing e-Invoicing in Europe
The High Level Group on Reducing Bureaucracy, led by former Bavarian Minister President Dr. Edmund Stoiber, has concluded that electronic invoicing is especially important for reducing bureaucracy. In its closing report at the end of 2009, the European Commission Expert Group on E-Invoicing put forward a number of recommendations for developing the use of E-Invoicing even further throughout Europe. These recommendations are currently being implemented at all levels, and many countries have already initiated specific projects.

EXPP Summit 2010
Europe’s leading Congress on E-Invoicing & E-Billing will celebrate its sixth anniversary this year.

Top-notch speakers will talk about their experiences with E-Invoicing projects over the course of two days. The European EXPP Summit 2010 will reward the participants with an exclusive series of success stories and best practice sessions from numerous industries across Europe.

• Hear the latest news on market trends, perspectives, standards and initiatives
• Success stories telling how the Procure-to-Pay process and the Financial Supply Chain have been improved and how they can help to reduce costs considerably
• Focus on the different possibilities for implementing E-Invoicing & E-Billing and for harmonising legislation in Europe

The mixture of lectures from experts in the field and professionals with practical experience, as well as podium discussions, roundtables, large exhibition area and especially the focus on Europe will make the European EXPP Summit 2010 a compulsory event for CEOs, CFOs, CIOs, Heads of A/R and A/P, Procurement, Invoice Management and E-Invoicing decision makers from all over Europe.

Further information and the registration form can be found at:
www.expp-summit.com

This article is from E-invoicing Platform. Read the original post at: Six EEI Platform members contribute to EXPP Summit 2010.

A unique web-based platform, it contains everything businesses need to buy, sell and manage cash more efficiently and effectively than ever before.

• Technology: Market-leading applications for spend management, collaborative finance management, and sales acceleration management.
• Community: The Ariba Network, the world’s largest Web-based trading community, where more than 300,000 global businesses to discover, connect, and collaborate. And Ariba Exchange, the industry-leading customer community for networking, sharing best practices, and collaborating with partners and peers.
• Capabilities: Market, category, technical, strategic and other expert capabilities that can be accessed on-site or via the Web to support ever-changing business needs.

Whether looking to control costs, increase sales, minimize risk, or enhance cash flow, companies can do it better in the Ariba Commerce Cloud.

Read the brochure: Ariba Business Commerce Solutions

This article is from E-invoicing Platform. Read the original post at: The Ariba® Commerce Cloud.

Click here to download your free copy now (registration required).

This article is from E-invoicing Platform. Read the original post at: Accountis White Paper: How to make real savings in AP Finance.

Sterling Commerce, an AT&T Inc (NYSE:T) company, today announced the results of a global survey that examines how companies manage the complexity of cross-border invoicing.
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The research highlights the cost savings to be gained by automating country-specific mandates for cross-border invoicing around processing, archiving and auditing; notably through the elimination of error-prone manual processing and the reduction of associated penalties and fines.
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The survey found that, on average:

• Each paper invoice error costs companies $53.50 to rectify.
• Accounts payable (AP) departments receive 35 percent of invoices in paper form.
• Only a quarter (25 percent) of invoices are sent via a fully-automated electronic method.

“The survey demonstrates the benefits of full electronic invoicing,” said Ken Ramoutar, vice president, Product and Industry Marketing, at Sterling Commerce.  “However, going from a paper invoice to an electronic invoice is only half the battle; the true success of e-invoicing depends on fully understanding the regulatory criteria of processing, automating, archiving and auditing, which varies geographically.  This is especially relevant to U.S. companies doing business in countries that impose a value-added tax (VAT).

Fines can be severe if companies attempt to claim back VAT in breach of regulation.  From our experience with customers, however, awareness of the need to prepare for e-invoicing regulation is lower in the U.S. than elsewhere.”
Approximately half (49 percent) of companies experienced two audits or more over the previous three years.   Of the companies surveyed that had experienced VAT audits:

• More than one in three (34 percent) incurred fines from tax authorities.
• Nearly one quarter (24 percent) incurred fines for not being compliant with customer mandates.

The survey finds that by moving from manual, paper-based invoice processes to fully automated, electronic invoice processing, businesses can achieve:

• Cost savings of 90 percent on the AP side, as manually-processed invoices cost, on average, $30 per invoice to process, while fully-automated invoices average only $3.50 per invoice to process.
• Cost savings of 44 percent in the accounts receivable (AR) departments, where manually-processed invoices cost, on average, $4 per invoice and fully-automated invoices $2.25 per invoice to process.
• Error reduction of 37 percent on all types of invoices.
• Storage costs savings – With more than 40 percent of companies retaining archives for up to 10 years, these will be significant.
  • Savings amount to 67 percent on AP and 32 percent on AR invoices, with fully electronic invoices of all kinds costing on average $1.30 to store, while paper AP invoices cost $3.90 and paper AR invoices $1.90 each to store.

The survey, commissioned by Sterling Commerce and conducted by Forrester Consulting in December 2009, was undertaken across accounts payable, accounts receivable and tax management functions in enterprises with annual revenue ranging from $250 million to $5 billion in the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, France, Netherlands, Sweden, Spain and Italy.  It looked at enterprises in the manufacturing, retail, communications/media and distributions/logistics industries.  The research data was used to create an e-Invoicing savings calculator, which is available at: www.sterlingeinvoicingsavings.com.
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“Companies trading internationally must be alert to their financial and regulatory responsibilities, or risk fines and sanctions,” said Ramoutar. “Companies are usually aware of VAT regulations in their own country, but often lack the depth of knowledge required for compliant cross-border invoicing.  In addition to the cost of fines, unsuccessful audits also may affect ‘vendor rating,’ making a further case for e-invoicing. Simply creating an electronic document such as a PDF invoice is not sufficient to achieving compliant e-invoicing and avoiding fines.”

About Sterling Commerce
Sterling Commerce, an AT&T Inc (NYSE:T) company, helps companies optimize and transform their Business Collaboration Network to accelerate revenues and reduce costs.  Sterling Commerce provides more than 18,000 customers worldwide with applications and integration solutions to connect, communicate and collaborate inside and outside their enterprise.  More information can be found at www.sterlingcommerce.com.

This article is from E-invoicing Platform. Read the original post at: Survey: companies risk fines for non-compliance with cross-border invoicing regulation.

The European Commission has published the feedback statement summarising the responses received to its public consultations on the Final report of the Expert Group on Electronic Invoicing.
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http://ec.europa.eu/internal_market/payments/einvoicing/index_en.htm

This article is from E-invoicing Platform. Read the original post at: EC: feedback statement on final report of the Expert Group on e-Invoicing.

“In the 21st century, information and communication technologies have a crucial role to play in creating sustainable jobs and boosting Europe’s economic growth, as outlined in the Europe 2020 Strategy, and so contributing to our economic recovery and long-term prosperity.

While the ICT sector is responsible for 5 per cent of European GDP it is responsible for no less than 50 per cent of our productivity growth.

Digital technologies also have a key role to play in improving people’s daily lives, for example in terms of increasing consumer choice, better access to information, entertainment and other services, improving healthcare and tackling environmental challenges like climate change.

To quote Harvard Professor Yochai Benkler, “We have an opportunity to change the way we create and exchange information, knowledge, and culture. By doing so, we can make the twenty first century one that offers individuals greater autonomy, political communities greater democracy, and societies greater opportunities for cultural self-reflection and human connection.”

This explains why the European Commission is today launching an ambitious Digital Agenda for Europe to maximise the potential of ICT to boost Europe’s prosperity and the well-being of its citizens.

The Digital Agenda for Europe outlines seven priority areas for action:

• creating a digital Single Market
• greater interoperability
• boosting internet trust and security
• much faster internet access
• more investment in research and development
• enhancing digital literacy skills and inclusion and
• applying information and communications technologies to address challenges facing society like climate change and the ageing population.

To give you some examples, within a Digital Single Market, citizens should be able to enjoy commercial services and cultural entertainment across borders. But EU online markets are still separated by barriers which hamper access to pan-European telecoms services, digital services and content. Today there are four times as many music downloads in the US as in the EU because of the lack of legal offers and fragmented markets. The Commission therefore intends to open up access to legal online content by simplifying copyright clearance, management and cross-border licensing. Other actions include making electronic payments and invoicing easier and simplifying online dispute resolution.

We need to improve ICT standard-setting and interoperability so that ICT products and services are open and interoperable.

To enhance trust and security so that Europeans can feel confident and safe online, we propose for example a better coordinated European response to cyber-attacks, identity theft and spam, and reinforced rules on personal data protection.

To improve Europeans’ access to fast and ultra fast internet, the Commission will for example explore how to attract investment in broadband through credit enhancement mechanisms and will give guidance on how to encourage investment in fibre-based networks.

To boost cutting-edge research and innovation in ICT, the Digital Agenda aims to for example leverage private investments with European regional funding and increasing EU research funding to ensure that Europe keeps up with and even surpasses its competition.

To empower all Europeans with digital skills and accessible online services, the Commission will for example propose digital literacy and competences as a priority for the European Social Fund regulation (2014-2020) and develop tools to identify and recognise the competences of ICT practitioners and users.

Finally, to unleash the potential of ICT to benefit society, the Digital Agenda will promote the smart use of ICTs and the exploitation of information to seek solutions to reduce energy consumption for example through smart meters and ICT-based light management systems, support ageing citizens, empower patients and improve online access for people with disabilities.

To reach the Digital Agenda’s objectives, we outline some 100 specific follow-up actions, including some 31 legislative proposals.

We intend to measure progress on achieving these objectives with specific targets. For example:

by 2013, broadband coverage for all EU citizens and, by 2020, fast broadband coverage at 30 Mega Bytes per second for all EU citizens, with at least half European households subscribing to broadband access at 100 Mega Bytes per second

by 2015, 50 per cent of the EU population should be shopping online, with 20% of the population using cross-border online services

by 2015, regular internet use increased from 60 per cent to 75 per cent, and in the case of disadvantaged people from 41per cent to 60 per cent

by 2015, halve the proportion of people who have never used the internet (from 30 per cent to 15 per cent)

by 2015, 50 per cent of EU citizens should be using online public services, with more than half of them returning filled in forms via the internet

by 2020, doubling EU Member States’ total annual public spending on ICT Research and Development to €11 billion.

Ensuring rapid adoption and implementation of the measures necessary to meet the Digital Agenda’s objectives is a tough challenge. In the coming months and years, my fellow Commissioners and I will work together with the EU’s institutions and stakeholders at all levels in all Member States to make the Digital Agenda a reality.

The digital world affects us all – there is no choice about that. But we can take the decision to use these changes to boost European growth, jobs and the well-being of our citizens. That is the decision the Commission is taking today, and we call on all those with a stake in this digital future for Europe to join us in moving forward.”

Source: http://europa.eu

This article is from E-invoicing Platform. Read the original post at: Vice-President of the EC Neelie Kroes: The Digital Society is the future.