One of the most interesting presentations of the day was given by the event organiser, Bruno Koch of Billentis. Bruno presented what he termed to be an alternative and more pragmatic model for e-invoicing service provision and called it “Model B”.  According to the research conducted by Billentis, e-invoice volumes are dominated by the small-medium and consumer sectors. The table below illustrates the spilt of invoice volumes according to organisation size.

In total, about 81% of invoice volumes are exchanged in the small-medium and consumer sectors and in these sectors the predominant format is PDF. Bruno argues that operators should provide better services to capture invoices as documents, to use PDF as the primary e-invoice format with EDI/XML data provided as an additional service.

In “Model B”, the operator accepts real documents (e.g. Word, PDF, etc.) from the sender and delivers the document electronically to the recipient in a manner which is secure and compliant with the tax laws. As an additional service, the operator also extracts the data from the document and delivers the data in a format suitable for the recipient.

Providing services that most parties find easy to understand, access and use is the only way operators can drive mass adoption.

Interestingly, this is exactly the mechanism used by Accountis with its ebPrinter technology. With Accountis, anybody that can print an invoice, can send an e-invoice.

Source: Accountis

This article is from E-invoicing Platform. Read the original post at: Blogpost: Model B Introduced at the European EXPP Summit 2008.