Posts Tagged ‘guidelines’
The Ecofin Council reached a general agreement on a directive aimed at modernising VAT invoicing requirements
Read MoreLufthansa is reducing costs and paper consumption with OB10 e-Invoicing in its accounting department.
Lufthansa has announced that it is implementing electronic invoicing with OB10, the world’s leading e-Invoicing network. The objective is to use the OB10 service to generate tax-compliant invoices, thereby reducing invoice management costs both in Germany and internationally.
“OB10 is an international operation – like Lufthansa – and fulfils our requirements for electronic invoice processing in the countries that are most important to us. Thanks to our ANY-TO-ANY DATA FORMATTING we can handle any type of invoice format – without requiring our customers or their suppliers to install additional hardware or software.”
“We are proud that with Deutsche Lufthansa AG, we are working with another client who wants to encourage their suppliers to become part of our global network.”
Although the majority of invoices at Lufthansa in Germany are already received via EDI (with the accompanying summary invoice) thousands of paper invoices for goods and services still arrive at Lufthansa every year. The manual processes for managing incoming invoices are not only time-consuming and costly, but also prone to error. All of this will now come to an end. As part of the new e-Invoicing project, which will initially be implemented in Germany and eight other countries including the US, the UK and Canada, the majority of invoices will be processed completely in electronic form using OB10.
Lufthansa equips itself for the future
In addition to the cost savings e-Invoicing delivers, Lufthansa expects the cooperation with OB10 to lead to considerable process simplification. Over the medium term, the entire Financial Supply Chain is to be moved to an electronic process. Additional advantages of the e-Invoicing system include faster transmission of invoices and significantly improved data quality as invoice information is fed directly into the ERP system and its associated archive. Lufthansa will also benefit from higher productivity in its invoice processing due to the automated validation of invoice data. Furthermore, pure electronic invoicing will greatly reduce the number of invoices from suppliers that cannot be allocated, and therefore significantly reduce the accompanying queries and complaints regarding payment. e-Invoicing also has advantages for suppliers as they not only profit from reduced process costs, but also the cost and time delays associated with posting invoices.
“OB10 is an international operation – like Lufthansa – and fulfils our requirements for electronic invoice processing in the countries that are most important to us,” says Martin Steuernagel, Department Manager for External Accounting at Deutsche Lufthansa AG. “That makes OB10 the ideal partner to simplify many of our more complex external invoicing procedures with e-Invoicing. What really tipped the scales for OB10, however, was the supplier enrolment programme, which will ensure that our international suppliers and partners will also be promptly connected to the OB10 network. Nobody else offers this type of programme – in seven different languages – and it will help us save valuable time and resources as we implement the overall project.”
“Thanks to our ANY-TO-ANY DATA FORMATTING we can handle any type of invoice format – without requiring our customers or their suppliers to install additional hardware or software,” adds Jamie Gunn, CEO, OB10. “We are proud that with Deutsche Lufthansa AG, we are working with another client who wants to encourage their suppliers to become part of our global network.”
About OB10
OB10 (www.OB10.com) is the leading global B2B e-Invoicing network. OB10 simplifies and streamlines the complex invoice-to-pay processes. Neither client organizations nor their suppliers are required to implement any hardware or software, and OB10 is independent of data file formats. OB10 can reduce the cost of paper invoice processing by typically 60 percent and can deliver an ROI in less than a year if the program follows OB10′s best practice guidelines. Operational across Europe, North America and Asia, OB10 is compliant with the requirements of VAT, tax and e-Invoicing legislation and receives invoices from suppliers in over 100 countries. To ensure unrivalled and rapid supplier enrollment, each new customer’s suppliers are supported by an implementation services team responsible for getting them up and running on the OB10 network.
The Dutch banks have composed a standard message for the customer initiation of a European bank transfer. This allows business and IT customers and / or ERP providers to a set up a generic and correct SCT UNIFI / XML message supported by the Dutch banks.
Read the ‘SEPA Credit Transfer XML customer-to-bank Implementation Guidelines for the Netherlands’
The initiating group ‘SEPA Migration NL’ have also come up with the Dutch Implementation Guidelines set to create a ‘level playing field’ for their corporate customers and software vendors active in SEPA.
The Dutch Association of Banks strongly recommends the use of the Dutch bank-customer SCT Implementation Guidelines to banks and their corporate clients.
The use of the Dutch Implementation Guidelines does not exclude the use of Belgian or other Implementation Guidelines. A bank can make additional appointments with its customers.
The new bank-client standards will replace the existing, because they do not meet all the SEPA requirements. Thus, BIC and IBAN cannot be used.
Source: www.sepanl.nl
Late June 2008 the CEN/ISSS eInvoice Phase II Workshop unveiled the Draft Good Practice Guidelines. The objective of this document is to reduce some of the principal areas of uncertainty and resulting inefficiencies on the e-invoicing market with one single set of good practice. These guidelines should be applicable to both businesses and tax administrations across Europe.
CEN and eInvoicing
CEN is acronym for: COMITÉ EUROPÉEN DE NORMALISATION and has a focus on standardisation aspects. CEN carries out numerous standardisation efforts, one of which is the CEN/ISSS initiative. CEN/ISSS is the name given to CEN’s ICT (Information and Communication Technologies) sector activities. It provides market players with a comprehensive and integrated range of standardisation services and products, in order to contribute to the success of the Information Society in Europe. CEN/ISSS works through CEN Focus Groups, Technical Committees and Workshops.
The CEN/ISSS eInvoicing Phase II Workshop
The CEN/ISSS Workshop Phase II has assumed the overall responsibility, as far as CEN is concerned, for the standards aspects of the European Commission’s expert group on electronic invoicing, complementing and linking with the relevant Commission groups, and ensuring the relevant global standards activities are correctly informed and primed. In this activity, it aims to ensure collaboration with other CEN/ISSS groups, including WS/ePPE and WS/eBES, with UN/CEFACT (TBGs1 and 5), ISO TC 68 and ETSI/TC ESI.
The eInvoicing Phase II Workshop objectives
The objective of this particular Workshop is to help to fill gaps in standardization for the use of electronic invoice processes, to identify the various practices in member states, to integrate the emerging technical and practical solutions into effective good practices, and to define and disseminate these good practices for e-invoices in close coordination and cooperation with private industry, solution providers and public administrations.
Five initial projects
Five initial Task Groups (TG’s) have been established with a focus on:
- Enhanced adoption of electronic invoicing in business processes in Europe;
- Compliance of electronic invoice implementations with Council Directive 2001/115/EC and Directive on the Common
System of Value Added Tax (2006/112/EC) as well as Member States’ national legislation as regards electronic
invoicing
- Cost-effective authentication and integrity of electronic invoices regardless of formats and technologies
- Effective implementation of compliant electronic invoice systems in using emerging technologies and business
processes and
- Emerging network infrastructure of invoice operators throughout Europe.
TG2 and TG3: The Draft Good Practice Guidelines
TG 2 (compliance of electronic invoice implementations) and TG 3 (cost effective authentication and integrity) decided to cooperate and created the Draft Good Practice Guidelines. The Draft Good Practice Guidelines identify two major obstacles when it comes to the regulatory aspects of e-invoicing adoption.
First, “businesses that implement electronic invoicing are often faced with thousands of technical and process implementation options along the way. In the absence of implementation-relevant rules emanating from tax administrations or standards bodies, the uncertainty surrounding these many choices creates a significant barrier to investment in electronic invoicing. As a result, for those vendors and users that choose to invest nevertheless, it is hard to make any value judgment as to how “compliant” their services and solutions are. Corporate e-invoicing users, Service Providers and solution vendors that are taking steps to develop and maintain VAT-compliant services naturally have a desire to have to a concrete yardstick against which to measure and with which to demonstrate their compliance.”
Second, nowadays “most tax administrations do not provide accreditation services or self-assessment programmes to assist e-invoicing users or their Service Providers to ascertain that e-invoicing systems are VAT-compliant. Tax administrations’ audit methodologies and tools are often developed based on the experiences of law enforcement and not widely propagated to businesses as compliance checklists.”
How it works
As stated above, the Draft Good Practice Guidelines seek to reduce some of the principal areas of uncertainty and resulting inefficiencies on the e-invoicing market with one single set of good practice Guidelines for both businesses and tax administrations.
It consists of two documents: one word document and one Excel sheet.
The Word document provides context to the Excel document and tries to explain how one should use the Excel. The Excel sheet identifies the main issues in question at each processing step during the life cycle of an electronic invoice for different invoicing methods (direct invoicing from Supplier to Buyer as well as Self-Billing) and provides detailed process guidance for a variety of implementation options including web publication, the use of various integrity and authenticity-enhancing methods and the retention of electronic invoices.
The Excel sheet takes into account:
- who directs the e-invoicing process
- whether an intermediate party is involved
- the possibility of a self billing variant
- the method being used to guarantee authenticity and integrity: EDI, digital signatures, other instruments
- the predefined (business) process steps necessary to perform e-invoicing
Based on your choices in these variables, the Excel sheet should be able to present you:
- the inherent tax risks that your organisation poses when initiating e-invoicing based on the choices made.
- the tax requirements necessary or even obligatory needed to address the risks
- the controls or solutions that should be in place to ensure the risks are avoided
Concluding remarks
The Draft Good Practice Guidelines are very promising, as they are intended to rule out uncertainty on e-invoicing form a legal/VAT/compliance perspective.But there are some downsides to this version of the Draft Good Practice Guidelines.
Hence the only two percepted barriers to full scale adoption of e-invoicing: standardisation and awareness, would remain.
First of all the Excel sheet does not, or at least not very easily, provide the results needed for an organisation get a sense of safety. It might be a good idea to create a database version that is much more accessible.
Second, this Draft Good Practice Guideline is still a concept. Or as the Word document states: “These Guidelines and Commentary are a work in progress and out for review. While every effort has been made to ensure consistency with legal requirements that apply to e-invoicing in the European Union, no guarantees of legal compliance or fitness for purpose are made by the drafters or CEN; any use of these documents is at the user’s own risk”.
Download the Draft Good Practice Guidelines (Word)
Download the Draft Good Practice Guidelines (Excel)
The IDABC programme (http://ec.europa.eu/idabc/) is supporting the design and development of eProcurement solutions compliant with the public procurement Directives 2004/17/EC and 2004/18/EC, by providing tools (mainly, the eProcurement demonstrators, the helpdesk service and the Functional Requirements) that can be used as examples and guidelines. The eProcurement Forum, a community within the ePractice portal, is organizing in cooperation with Auftrag.AT a workshop to exchange experiences about the development of Public eProcurement solutions aligned with the European legislation. The workshop will take place on the 14th January 2009 at the Schönbrunn Palace Conference Centre in Wien (Austria).
The participants will have the opportunity to have an insight into the IDABC eProcurement demonstrators and to be presented with some eProcurement cases developed using the IDABC tools as sources of inspirations. This workshop targets all the European eProcurement experts and in particular those belonging to:
- Public Administrations that are setting up new eProcurement solutions and are interested in capitalising on other experiences and in receiving information on available guidelines and tools
- IT companies in charge of the development of eProcurement solutions
- Organisations responsible for existing eProcurement solutions that need to be aligned with the European legislation
A “Call for presentations” is open until the 5th December 2008. Please contact the eProcurement Forum by e-mail (eprocurement@epractice.eu) if you need further information on the event, or if you are interested in sharing your experience and in presenting a case.
Registration is possible via the ePractice website at http://www.epractice.eu/workshop/37. Please note that attendance is free and open to everyone who has been registered on the ePractice portal. Since the available places are limited, interested experts are invited to register soon.
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