Past post include: AP Automation in 2012, Electronic Invoicing Options for Accounts Payable and 2011–An Electronic Invoice Review.

Regards
James R. Clawson

Online publisher of Instruction, Benchmarks, News, Forms, Checklists, Templates, Calculators, Reference Tables, online video and in-person Training, Online Staff Training; we produce webinars, e-newsletters, online summits and the live Accounts Payable Leadership Conference.

We are the co-developer/provider of The Accounts Payable Certification Programs, with IOMA (now IOFM), the largest, most recognized Accounts Payable certification in the world.

Cheers,
Rob

How about including Ardent Partners here :)?

I believe, espcially in Africa, that a combined approach is mandated by the capabilities of the recipient company/person. i.e. Paper and Electronic may need to be used and may be the best approach. That said, even if you use some paper, you can still manage the process, if approached properly, using a single platform. In other words a single extract, generation and archive process but just change the send channel – paper or electronic. eBilling service suppliers should offer a full outsource service that includes all channels including print and post.

This solution addresses cross border invoicing and is true 4-corner e-Invoicing. For more information about how other providers or corporate can start using SWIFT for secure and global e-Invoicing visit the http://www.bottomline.co.uk or Tieto websites.

Next step is fully digital catalogues and order to invoice with automatch.

So, 19.6 percent is “the most popular”. Gee, what does PreyPal call the other 80.4 percent? “The most UNpopular?” Does anyone actually read this PR nonsense before they send it out?

eBay / PayPal / Donahoe: Dead Men Walking.

Thank you for your comment. We changed the phrase “e-invoices’ into “e-bills”.

When it comes to the definition of “e-invoicing”, well that seems to be different between geographical regions, between key actors and even within key actors.

With regard to the latter. In the comments you’ll find several comments from BSP’s with different explanations of with they believe e-invoicing is.

Bruno makes a valid point here, pointing out the difference of process in Taiwan compared to European e-invoicing landscape. Editor’s argument seems to be that if something transits from paper to bits and bytes, that’s e-invoicing / e-billing. My question: which of the two is it and do we all even understand these terms alike?

To me, e-invoicing is something that is machine readable, process indipendent, cross-platform and cross-industry.

If Taiwan is implementing a process where all sales receipts are obtainable in an electronic form to a governmental process (as Bruno explained, I don’t know about this) it is certainly an “e”-process, but not necessarily an “invoice”-process. The distinction seems quite clear: these messages can only be processed by the Taiwanese government for taxation purposes. This message can not be sent to me (to another country) nor can I send one abroad.

I’m more than happy to discuss about the possibilities of application integration and open interfaces on governmental processes. I even have some great examples. But to call that e-invoicing seems a bit misleading.

Thank you for your comment.

We like to make a distinction between on the one hand the backgrounds behind the move and on the other hand the effects of the move.

Regardless of its possible background (reducing paper, fiscal compliance, preventing tax evasion), the actual effects of the move are that the paper bills are replaced with e-bills. So, going from paper fibres to bits and bytes is e-invoicing/e-billing. Right?

From a cultural and historical perspective Taiwan is very capable in realising such major transitions. But not only Taiwan, but also several other Asian countries. In fact the Latin American countries also showed how fast things can go.

Remarkably, the European transpose their perception e-invoicing/e-billing/ap automation on other continents. While these continents show far greater progress than Europe does, when they put their minds to it.

Perhaps it would be good to change the ‘teacher’ and ‘student’ roles sometimes?

Vesa Kotilainen – you can certainly “fetch” bills online or just use other push based channels such as email and RSS for delivery. That way not bothering with visiting multiple sites.

Good one. I believe you have a real business case there if you build something. Both for B2C/G2C (e-billing) and B2B/B2G (e-invoicing).

We use Lastpass in combination with Symbaloo to make things easier for us.

The E-invoicing Platform.

Let’s say I get approx. 7 bills per month. One cannot expect me to log into 7 different sites with 7 different credetials and open 7 different invoices in order to just pay my dues.

I thought that the liberalization would be in effect as from January 1st 2013 ?

Thanks again. Best regards. Daniel

Thank you for your feedback and additional information

The E-invoicing Platform

Thank you for your elaborate comment.

The E-invoicing Team

Thank you for expressing you opinion.

Only 15 or so of the national fora are in place. Some of these national fora have an even worse set of objectives and an even worse representation then the EU Forum.

We’ll just have to wait and see. But it’s not looking good.

E-invoicing Platform team

Take the TAXUD statement that (if you pardon my paraphrasing)the form of an invoice is legally unrelated to a company’s ability to prove invoice integrity and authenticity. This seems to upset some people while others present it like a revolution.

The phrase “substance over form” has been used to summarize the changes introduced with Directive 2010/45. It is a great injustice to penalize a company which has perfect evidence of its invoices merely because this evidence is not in a predefined imposed form. This injustice was legally possible under the previous VAT Directive rules, and the market should applaud its removal.

This positive change however has nothing to do with the form in which invoices are received or archived. The form of an invoice and the form of evidence of integrity and authenticity of an invoice are two entirely unrelated issues – that, in my reading at least, is one of the key reasons for the TAXUD clarification.

The pre-2010/45 situation was never characterized in any significant way by Member States’ insistence on symmetry of form for invoices stored by trading partners. There are some countries were form symmetry has been or continues to be a written rule (in France, for example, the tax administration’s guidance notes on the 2001 Directive transposition required form symmetry for e-invoices under the EDI option) – but thios has not been an overwhelming majority. So why this cheering or depression over a minor and really quite logical explanation from TAXUD?

To be VAT compliant, each trading partner must store:
(1) an invoice –and there can only be one invoice, which is why the market has often used the term “original” invoice to distinguish it from other invoice-like data that parties may exchange or process; however this term has fallen into disrepute because it has become frequently misused to imply symmetry of form– that is or can be made legible and
(2) evidence of its integrity and authenticity.

Under the 2001 rules, the form of (2) could be restriced by Member States. (1) has always been defined by its content. Under the 2010 rules, now also (2) can take any form. (2) is determined by its adequacy –read: is it sufficient to convince a tax auditor?– and in some cases (Art 233.2) by law.

(1) and (2) are legally completely separate notions, however the form of (1) may be affected by or play a role in the strength of (2) — it should not come as a surprise that if a taxable person can prove that the form of an invoice is identical to the form in which it was issued, this can contribute to evidence that also the semantic content has not changed. Conversely, if you store e.g. an EDI message that has been converted seven times before you formally received it from your supplier, this means (at least under the EDI compliance option) that you must maintain evidence of these conversions all being sufficiently controlled in order to convince a tax auditor that the content of the invoice has not changed. If you have and maintain this evidence there should be absolutely no problem – but naturally, maintaining audit trails of seven historical conversions requires quite a bit more control and thus introduces risk compared to maintaining no such audit trails at all.

The key point here is, however, that legally under the new Directive you’re free to make your own choices as long as you have (1) and (2).

This is not the place to go into the differences as regards the role of form in the different compliance approaches, however hopefully the above shows why I believe the noise about freedom of invoice form to be unjustified.

Couple of current players in the market are trying to write their own rules, but still hope there is opportunity for a successfull interoperability in the market.

Totally agree that current business models cannot be based only on transactional revenue and there should more value added services in the market. The fact is, there are only limited amount of invoices, and after tough competition average transaction price is even below 0,05 €, there is no business case to have so many players in the market. We can allready see same phenomenon as in the transactional printing market for 10-15 years ago. Prices are declining even the e-penetration is still very low.

But, let’s try to concentrate on open ideas ( networks, address services :-)) and make positive business case for the customers and service providers at least in European market!

Frank Lodewijks

Our core Cloud Invoice service operates at the data level within the PDF – reading the data as the original billing system intended. We also have Cloud Invoice:OCR which converts scanned paper invoices. All our solutions are delivered as a services in the cloud, with zero software footprint.

Feel free to contact me through the enquiry page on our site if you need more information. Regards, Richard

Changes have not been made official and still subject to change, however, have in mind that if your company already issues electronic invoicing, will have to make adjustments to comply with the new regulations.

Luis F. Sanchez

all this is confirmed. For companies, like Alcatel-Lucent, which owns its own paperless / electronic invoice platform, we will investigate on the possibility to be our own PAC in order to minimize impact.

Target Go-Live for us in Mexico is Mid 2012 as we are already in the CFD model.

any questions or investigation, please contact me.

Guillaume Hatt
Fiscal Paperless, electronic document mngt and B2B Program Manager

The issue is the word e-mail. Personally I do not have anything against e-mail, but most of the accounting/book keeping BPO’s want to use professional e-mail networks instead of e-mail. This is due SLA and some legal issues. I am sure that the cost will not be an issue as some of the services even cost less than the stamp alone, not counting the envelope. In Finland alone there are almost 10 different parties that you can use for e-invoices if you are not too “addicted” to e-mail based solution, but Web would do as well ;-)

About the SEPA: Actually SEPA has been mandatory only for couple of months now. The goal is to get the lead times in payments down, but there are some parties resisting that due legacy and historical reasons….

If you want great coverage of the investment I suggest reading http://blogs.wsj.com/tech-europe/2011/10/25/tradeshift-secures-17-million-funding/

Thank you for your valuable input.

In our opinion, when a company invest money in another company, they want something in return. Good chance that that is a certain amount of shares, that they can sell at a higher price in the near future (the exit). So, a VC performs a partial acquisition of a company.

But he, good for you and your team. Congrats.

Greetings

Btw. other companies who got money from a “bunch of russians” this year include Facebook, Twitter and Zynga

Output Management software like LaserNet is able to extract information from PDF invoices and convert/deliver these data directly to any ERP system or workflow solution.

It have to be set up once though. Then it´s a 100% automated process.

–> Can you direct me to some product that will allow me to automatically import a PDF into my accounting software? I suppose Shoeboxed sort-of does this, is that the kind of thing you are referring to? Or is there another category of product aimed SMEs who want to automate the processing of PDF invoices? (Shoeboxed is more about processing receipts for expense claims, rather than invoices)

Europe is an implementation case this is why their efforts has been on building implementation profiles based on exising standards.
- PEPPOL is based on an abstract implementation profile (CEN/BII) that can be easely mapped on any CCTS based vocabulary (UBL 2.0 has been successfully used).
- The MUG effort is based on same CEN/BII concepts… an abstract implementation guide that can be mapped on any CCTS based business vocabulary.

Non-CCTS based languages are far to be semantically compatible to BII or MUG.

The market can safely choose to start today using PEPPOL BIS specifications and experimenting the MUG as well with any CCTS based vocabulary.

If you are looking for a consistent and mature set of e-business messages, UBL is the best around. If we want a top e-invoice the upcoming UBL 2.1 is an impressive effort and it is promising many features for use within the whole Financial Supply Chain (see full Trade Financing support, external remittance, … etc).

The MUG offers a mapping to CII v.2 that can be implemented as well, but it is not complemented by a consistent set of business messages (the source of the invoice…, quotation,catalogue,order,…) and there is not a message for advanced payment remittance advices (to be used externally to clearing systems but in a combined way with ISO20022 messages)

The ICT market has enough material to provide the right instruments to facilitate SMEs on implementing new Standards.

This does not mean that PDF wouldn’t be a viable option in some countries. But in Finland, e-invoicing has developed way past this point and the study should be read in this context.

Fact: you need to facilitate your customers needs even with invoicing. In doing so, you send the best possible presentation of your invoice in the medium available.

Fact: you hopefully have more than one customers which means that your medium must support multiple recipients and not require any commercial 3rd party contracts to be made (i.e. support four-corner model – email is a great example of this, though technically it is more like Nth corner model).

Simple as that. In order to best serve your customers, I’d guestimate that the preferred format is some kind of XML which has some undisputed advantages. On the other hand, business requirements vary by business and country so if PDF is an option, go for it.

Fact: e-invoicing adoptation has many phases, of which the electronic presentation format is perhaps the first. This adoptation rate varies significantly within EU, so there can be no single answer to suit all needs.

Thank you for sharing your vision. How would you visualize e-invoicing adoption for SME’s?

P.S. only a small portion of SME’s is using e-invoicing, and part of that used PDF
P.P.S. using PDF is e-invoicing (eg new EU directive) and even PDF can be used for integrated einvoicing: http://bit.ly/pYERfD

Bottomline this week ‘announced it has gone live with a secure, real-time solution for sending and receiving invoices electronically via the global SWIFT network. E-invoicing presents a significant opportunity for banks and their corporate customers to streamline paper-laden processes and reduce costs while increasing visibility into the financial supply chain.’

Read more here – http://eeiplatform.com/5099/tieto-to-provide-e-invoicing-service-over-swift/

But dont ask for business case – our time is to precious… join the train or be left behind..
Thats reality.

If you look at your business documents as being tactical – dont call us… if you have a strategic approach – fell free to ask for help..

Carrsten Johan Thessen
CEO
National Expert UN/CEFACT

We are an e-invoicing company processing hundreds of thousands of invoices for our customers – we are the bad guys in your story – except we are not. Many suppliers use emailing PDF invoices as a first step to getting away from paper. However the problem for the recipient is that they have no way to process this electronically – they have to print it out and process it as a paper invoice. That doesn’t suit them if they are trying to automate invoice processing.

We recognised this and now we have a solution which will receive PDFs by email, strip them from the email, open them up, read and translate the data and create an XML file of the invoice which we then put into our customer’s finance system together with an image of the PDF. If the PDF is a simple image file (for example if you have scanned a document into a PDF) then we will run an OCR process on the image and create the XML from that. Being able to convert PDF to XML accurately has made a big difference to our customers and their suppliers!!

We would be happy to talk to any of of your customers about processing your PDF invoices and giving them a file in a format they can use.

Regards,
Peter

Thank you for sharing your view. Your post is a great addon: http://purchasinginsight.com/the-significance-of-germanys-e-invoicing-move/

Together, we can make it work!

If you have similar problems with e-invoicing — either as a seller or a buyer — would you please let me know? It could be powerful ammunition at the SIMFO conference in Krakow.

Even if you post your replies here as comments, could I ask you to also copy them to my email address kimmolinkama@gmail.com ? This allows me to find all the replies in one central place and avoid missing anyone. Many thanks!