OB10 (www.ob10.com), the leading global e-Invoicing network, today announced that it is launching an environmental program that recognizes its corporate and supplier customers who are taking significant steps to positively impact the environment by eliminating paper from their back-office accounts payable processes.

The initiative, titled the OB10 Green Program, is a continuation of OB10’s strong foundation of facilitating good environmental stewardship among its global customers and their suppliers. Paper-based invoicing is still a regular practice among many companies, whether they are sending and receiving invoices through the mail, implementing OCR or e-mailing an invoice that is printed at the recipient’s end.

By transitioning to OB10’s electronic invoicing network, companies have saved over 60 millions of sheets of paper as well as additional resources that go into the manufacturing and distribution of paper such as trees, oil, electricity and water. OB10 is recognizing a select number of customers and suppliers that have demonstrated a commitment to sustainability and e-Invoicing by awarding them the OB10 Green Award.

“OB10’s e-invoicing network automates and streamlines back-office accounts payable procedures in a manner that is environmentally prudent and makes good financial sense,” said Jamie Gunn, Chief Executive Officer for OB10. “In the course of our relationships, OB10 customers and suppliers have demonstrated an enthusiastic commitment to positively impacting our environment. We will continue to work with our customers and suppliers around the globe in a way that extends their sustainability programs while improving their bottom lines.”

For Accounts Payable OB10 Green Award winner and OB10 customer Mohawk Industries, a leading supplier of flooring for both residential and commercial applications, selecting OB10 as its e-Invoicing solution has complemented its sustainability platform that focuses on the five “Rs” – reduce, recover, reuse, renew, and recycle.

“Within five months of selecting OB10 as our e-Invoicing solution provider, more than 75 percent of our initial suppliers had enrolled in the OB10 Network, enabling our company to eliminate more than 400,000 paper invoices a year,” said Tracy Bryant, Accounts Payable Manager at Mohawk Industries. “The recognition of Mohawk’s sustainability efforts by Newsweek, Wal-Mart and the US General Services Administration is a testament to the strategic position that sustainability is given within our organization.”

As an OB10 customer, supplier to Mohawk and Accounts Receivable OB10 Green Award winner, Congoleum is another organization enhancing its green initiatives by leveraging the OB10 Network. To date, the New Jersey-based manufacturer of resilient sheet and tile flooring for both residential and commercial uses has saved more than 375,000 sheets, or three tons, of paper since joining the OB10 Network.

Congoleum isn’t the only supplier on the OB10 Network committed to sustainability. OfficeMax, a leader in business-to-business office products solutions and recipient of the Accounts Receivable Award, has saved over 300,000 sheets of paper, or the equivalent 40 trees, since joining OB10.

“We look for partners, like OB10, who deliver a value proposition that goes above and beyond the norm and helps us extend our environmental policy,” said William Bonner, Senior Director, External Relations at OfficeMax. “We believe there is more that we can achieve, so we always invite our associates, customers, shareholders and neighbors to join us in our effort to minimize adverse environmental impacts.”

In addition to the above, HP, an OB10 customer since 2003, also received the Accounts Payable OB10 Green Award. The recognition of HP illustrates the company’s commitment to electronic invoicing as a component of its overall environmental sustainability initiative.

OB10 will continue to recognize those organizations transacting on its network that are committed to sustainability. “As more organizations and their suppliers join the global OB10 e-Invoicing network, we’ll have a greater opportunity through the OB10 Green Program and accompanying award to hasten the permanent transition from paper to electronic invoicing,” said Jamie Gunn. “In addition, we offer a substantive way for our customers to decrease energy consumption, protect more of our green spaces, and facilitate good corporate citizenship and environmental sustainability.”

For more information about the OB10 Green Program, visit http://ob10.com/Country/US/OB10_Green_Program

Businesses have spent billions streamlining their internal operations. Yet few tackle the inefficiencies involved in dealings between companies. That’s where paper-based processes and outdated infrastructures lead to lost revenue and productivity. The Ariba Commerce Cloud is here to change all that.

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

Most countries apply a value-added-tax (VAT) or goods and service tax (GST) to the value that is added to goods and services at each step of the economic chain, and use the invoice as the key document for calculating and auditing this tax.
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However, each country applies its own regulatory requirements for electronic invoices which significantly increases the complexity of compliance for multi-national companies, and introduces costs and risks to your business.

The Sterling e-Invoicing Savings Calculator provides estimates of savings you could achieve through the automation of manual invoice processing, archiving and auditing. The calculations are based on data derived from a study commissioned by Sterling Commerce and completed in 2010 by Forrester Consulting on its behalf with companies across multiple industries and geographies.

Try the Calculator at:
www.sterlingeinvoicingsavings.com

Basware, the global leader in purchase-to-pay solutions, today announced the addition of supplier functionality to its Basware Connectivity services.  Basware Connectivity for Suppliers enables Accounts Receivable departments to deliver all sales invoices electronically to their customers, irrespective of the invoice format required by the customer organization.
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With Basware, Accounts Receivable departments can achieve a 100% e-invoicing capability from day one. E-invoicing increases invoice accuracy, as well as ensuring that invoices are sent on time and have been received.  This results in increased visibility over the entire process, facilitating cash flow forecasting as well as increased customer satisfaction as customers are able to process invoices electronically.

Basware Connectivity for Suppliers ensures timely delivery of sales invoices through the Basware Business Transactions service. Accounts Receivable can send all their sales invoices to all customers through one single service, which generates instant time and cost savings in reduced postal charges.  Basware routes the invoices to the appropriate delivery channel according to customer capabilities. To ensure delivery in the correct format for all customers, Basware provides Accounts Receivable with an outsourced printing service and the ability to deliver invoices by email to customers not yet able to receive e-invoices directly to their invoice processing solution. Once invoices have been delivered, they are archived to guarantee integrity, enabling future compliance where there are legal requirements for storing e-invoices.

According to independent research company Billentis, organizations can save as much as 57% per invoice in costs by turning their sales invoices electronic.  Toshiba TEC Germany, a recent Basware Connectivity for Suppliers customer, found in an internal study that by the time a paper invoice was printed, enveloped, stamped and sent to the post office for delivery, the total cost per invoice averaged € 1.61. A comparable electronic invoice costs a mere € 0.40. According to recent calculations, Toshiba is experiencing 75% savings in invoicing costs.

“Electronic payment and purchasing has clear business benefits. The more you get connected with your customers, the more likely it is that they will stay with you,” says Klaus Dieter Leifgen, IT manager at Toshiba TEC Germany Imaging Systems GmbH.

“An increasing number of Accounts Receivable departments are facing demand from their customers to provide e-invoices. We are already seeing this become a key criterion in vendor selection processes as they seek to improve collaboration across their supply chains,” said Esa Tihilä, SVP, Basware. “With these new services, Basware Connectivity allows Accounts Receivable teams to switch to e-invoicing instantaneously, without having to manage paper processes concurrently to cater for customers who are in the early development phases of their e-invoicing strategy. This allows suppliers to gain competitive advantage over their competitors while catering to the billing needs of existing customers.”

To learn more about these new services, please visit http://e-invoicing-for-suppliers.basware.com.

Read the entire article:
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It seems that text messages and e-mails are becoming the preferred and most effective way to increase collections. I know of at least one collection agency that has seen a 12 percent increase in collections by using electronic communication.
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E-mail and text messages seem to be a less invasive form of communication than a phone call, and your customers have the sense of being in control of when and if they respond.

Some collectors obtain customer consent for correspondence by text before the sale by simply adding a bit of wording to the credit application. The wording is similar to this:

“By signing this document, customer agrees to accept and understands that text messages may be used when servicing the account, including the collecting of debts.”

Others have taken it a step further, adding a more detailed outline of how text messages will be used and having customers sign and acknowledge the following provision:

“You the customer authorize us (company name) to send you (customer) a text message at any mobile number at which we reasonably believe we can contact you, for any lawful purpose, including but not limited to:

* Suspected fraud or identity theft on your account
* Obtaining information necessary to service your account
* Collecting on your account
* Notifying you of important issues regarding your account.”

If this is something you’re considering, it’s important to remember that all messages must include a mechanism for the consumer to opt out of receiving further text messages at any time. This protects the consumer as well as the collector, especially since the law does not specifically address text messages being sent as a form of dunning. If you decide to send billing alerts to customers by text message, it’s imperative the customer not be charged for the text and that your company incur any charge associated with the text.

Here are some dos and don’ts for using electronic communication in your debt-collection efforts:

Do:

* Skip tracing or locating debtors
* Researching collection tools, such as software or skip tracing tools
* Credit reporting
* Use database technology to maintain account information on customers
* Get authorization for each payment
* Research place of employment

Don’t:

* Send instant messages to a debtor about a debt
* Initiate unauthorized additional payments on a bank account.
* Send a friend request to a debtor on any social networking website

Michelle Dunn is an award winning author and columnist and has been called the nation’s authority on collecting money. She is the founder and CEO of Michelle Dunn’s Credit & Collections Association, one of the top 5 women in collections, and one of the top 50 most influential collection professionals in the industry.

Source: Entrepeneur.com

This survey forms part of the UN/CEFACT eBGT Gap analysis projects.

For several years the United Nations Centre for Trade Facilitation and Electronic Business (CEFACT) has been developing a set of electronic standards for international trade data.

Progress has been slower than had been hoped for, and CEFACT is currently reassessing stakeholder needs and priorities to ensure that its work is addressing the most urgent requirements.

CEFACT has formed three project teams to report quickly on:

• The current needs of stakeholders for open international standards for electronic international trade data messages; and which standards stakeholders would like CEFACT to deliver as priorities; “stakeholders” answering questions are likely to be those who are users or implementers of message standards;

• An assessment of the knowledge that stakeholders have in the CEFACT Core Component Library (CCL), which contains the data elements needed to complete messages, and the usability or otherwise of the CCL; “stakeholders” are likely to be organisations involved in developing standards for their own industry/region and implementers of message standards;

• The technical specifications that underpin message assembly and assure messages can be interpreted by different systems; “stakeholders” are likely to be the organisations involved in developing technology infrastructure standards, technology users and implementers of message standards.

CEFACT is consulting those already involved in CEFACT’s work as well as a selection of stakeholders that are not, in order to submit a report to CEFACT by the end of February 2010.

The project teams would like your urgent responses to a set of questions that address these issues, by 28 February 2010 at the latest. You are asked to complete only those that are of interest or relevance to your organisation.

The survey is available here

Source: UN/CEFACT

The last few weeks the EEI Platform developed its activity plan for the year 2010. Because al the instruments and activities mentioned in the 2009 activity plan were carried out completely, we asked our community to give feedback in an online poll on what activities and instruments should be part of the 2010 EEI Platform Activity plan and carried out accordingly.

And the feedback was overwhelming. The result is an ambitious plan for 2010 which is currently available for download and review. The deadline is 31 March 2010.

So, take a look at our concept activity plan and let us know if there is anything you’d like to see added or changed.

(And yes, as quite a few of you mentioned we also think to believe that we’ve developed a good impact ratio per euro. We can only imagine what an extra bit of funding would do…)

[download] CONCEPT EEI Platform Activity 2010

The recently renewed EEI Platform website has set up an online community. The European Electronic Invoicing Platform is a co-operation of organisations that play a role in the market for electronic invoicing.

This community now welcomes both those who are interested in e-invoicing (or invoice automation) and parties who offer products and services in the field of e-invoicing.

As e-invoicing is encouraged across national borders, the EEI Platform is now part of a larger community which brings together users, experts and providers from across Europe.

The communities of Platform ELFA (NL) and EEI Platform (Europe) are linked, creating a large free of charge community for anyone who wishes to contact (future) users, experts, providers, suppliers and policy makers. Soon, the newly set up EEI Platform Belgium is expected to be added to this community. The mission of this community is to give e-invoicing and invoice automation an extra impulse in the Netherlands, Belgium and of course Europe.

A few weeks ago we asked everyone to fill out our survey with instruments and activities that the EEI Platform could undertake in 2010. It is now time to display the interim results on our survey.

You can go through our survey at http://answers.polldaddy.com/poll/2229849. If you haven’t  filled out our poll, you still have the opportunity: the survey ends at 31 December 2009.

So, take a minute and speak up.

Thanks a lot.

Diagrams
Underneath is a circular diagram with the current interim results:

The bar diagram makes it even more visible:

At this point it becomes clear that the EEI ‘community’ (newsletter, twitter, RSS, LinkedIN) gives priority to:
- Statistic research on e-invoicing usage and adoption
- publication: “Starting with e-invoicing”
- suppliers guide
- EEI Conference
- Online community: online before 31-12-2009

Reuse before buy, buy before make
The EEI Platform is a convinced believer of this formula. Why not reuse what is already available.

For instance SEPA International presented its “E-invoicing Guide for SME’s” (which more targeted on Medium Sized Enterprises and Developers of financial software though). It is a starting-guide-on-e-invoicing-ish. The EEI Platform will publish it next week on its website.

And in its publication, SEPA International presents some of the findings from a SME questionnaire that the EC Expert Group sent out in 2008. But maybe a broader and more profound survey would also be welcomed.

So the EEI Platform will try to incorporate as much material as possible (and allowed) to enhance the impact of the results, before developing proprietary instruments.

The software is aimed at public administrations that wish to try out electronic procurement, including cross-border procurement.

The software is meant to bridge the legacy systems used by public administrations and the systems of their suppliers. João Rodrigues Frade, one of the IT architects involved with e-Prior, explains that “Public authorities can use Open e-Prior to manage their procurement processes electronically. They can use it to receive catalogues digitally, they can submit their orders on-line and they can manage their invoices this way, simply by exchanging electronic business documents.”

The system is built respecting specifications meant to facilitate public procurement, and that focus on cross-border interoperability, specifications eleborated by a workshop on Business Interoperability Interfaces for Public procurement in Europe (CEN BII).

Open e-PRIOR should also make it easy to connect to the Pan-European Public eProcurement On-Line project (Peppol), since it will come with a built-in Peppol gateway.

However, this Peppol gateway is not included on the version that was published on the OSOR Forge earlier this month, says Frade. “What we made available is a sneak-preview for the European Member States.”

He hopes that many public administrations will try out the e-Prior tool. “I hope they will join the OSOR Forge, so they can take part in the development.”

e-Prior is published using the European Union Public Licence (EUPL).

The DIGIT initiative supports the objectives of the i2010 e-Government Action Plan, aimed to accelerate adoption of e-Procurement in Europe.

Source: www.osor.eu

The aim of the EEI Platform is to reach as many people as possible and provide them by selecting instruments and activities with the biggest impact.

Looking forward to the second year of existence of the EEI Platform, we would like to ask your opinion on which instruments you think are the best to fit this aim. Of course you are invited to add your own thoughts.

Therefore, we will regularly post polls to have a clearer view on the community and to adapt our scope where necessary.

This first poll is about the focus on next year. What is your opinion on the following activities and instruments?

Thank you very much for your help!

To assist organizations searching for ways to optimize their Accounts Payable (AP) processes, OB10, the leading global e-Invoicing network, recently hosted a complimentary webinar titled Overcoming the Top 7 Barriers to e-Invoicing. The webinar, co-hosted by IOMA, the acknowledged leader in providing practical information to the AP profession, taught participants how to identify potential roadblocks when considering an e-Invoicing project for their organizations.

The webinar attracted almost 400 registrants interested in overcoming various obstacles when initiating an e-Invoicing project at their company. Each step outlined during the session provided practical tools that anyone in AP can utilize to help streamline the invoice receipt process and, ultimately, reduce costs.

Donna McGuinness, director, OB10 Western Region, was the featured speaker and walked participants through details of overcoming the seven barriers, starting with a need to understand where to begin as well as knowing what is important to which internal departments.

“Many organizations struggle with knowing where to start, let alone understanding what’s important to which internal groups while working to gain support,” said McGuinness. “Once you know where to begin and you’ve identified the issues that are important to your organization’s departments that may support such an initiative, the other five obstacles can be addressed more readily.”

An organization must then complete their due diligence in steps three and four; fully understanding which options and features are available from which vendors. “There are so many variations out there from so many different providers, it’s easy to become confused about which vendor may be right for you,” added McGuinness. “Organizations should take the time to ask as many questions as they can because it’s important to know and understand exactly what vendors will do and what they will not do. It’s also important to have a thorough understanding about what will be required by you, the buying organization, when implementing an e-invoicing initiative.”

Step five offers details on ensuring a return on investment (ROI) after implementing an e-invoicing initiative. “With other solutions such as OCR and EDI, it’s extremely difficult, if not impossible, to extract a compelling ROI,” said McGuinness. “Organizations considering these other solutions should note that costly hardware and software investments often make implementation cost-prohibitive. With e-Invoicing, significant ROI can be realized in as little as a year.”

Understanding all the details of an agreement and ensuring the selected vendor delivers on an organization’s expectations are critical to step six. Step seven offers insight into ensuring all the right questions have been asked and enough information has been collected to allow the buying organization to make an informed decision.

Duncan Jones, senior analyst for Forrester Research, in the Forrester Wave Report AP-EIPP, Q2 2008, states, “A major challenge for sourcing professionals who want to lead an AP-EIPP selection project is the diverse range of companies claiming to offer invoice automation solutions. Complete solutions will deliver four key capabilities: enable suppliers to submit invoices electronically, straight from their own systems; transform the data into a usable format and layout; validate data, using supporting records and discrepancy approval workflows; and provide process monitoring so buyers and suppliers can work together to reduce errors. Complete AP-EIPP solutions will automate the functions necessary to support these four stages of the invoice-to-pay process.”

“Organizations must also understand that success ultimately lies in the supplier enrollment process,” said McGuinness. “You can’t obtain ROI, cost savings or optimization without ensuring that your suppliers have been enrolled and are transacting. By following these simple but important steps, organizations can be better equipped to make informed decisions when selecting an e-Invoicing provider.”

To listen to the webinar in its entirety, including the FAQ session, and to fully understand what it takes to initiate a successful e-Invoicing project in your organization, log onto the OB10 web site at http://ob10.com/Country/US/Webinars_2 and click on the link near the bottom titled Overcoming the Top 7 Barriers to e-Invoicing.

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.

 
 
Duncan Jones, senior analyst at Forrester, gives a detailed account of why companies should embrace electronic invoicing.

A recent survey by the US Institute of Management and Administration found that the average administration cost per invoice is €30. Even more worrying, 70% of the AP managers surveyed did not know the figure for their own company. Yet companies that have implemented accounts payable electronic invoice presentment and payment (AP-EIPP) report huge savings and massive ROI. Finance directors with significant AP processing costs who haven’t yet done so should make it a priority to consider AP-EIPP and include it in their enterprise application strategies.

Humans are expensive and error-prone
Forrester Research has interviewed dozens of companies using AP-EIPP to find out what they have done and why. Our respondents cited three key issues driving the project’s business case. Prior manual processes, they told us, were:

Too slow to capture payment discounts and honour contracted payment terms.
One company had such a large backlog that many invoices were already overdue for payment before they were first touched by an AP clerk.

An expensive non-value-adding activity.
Our research aligns with the IOMA survey of cost per invoice ranging from €10 to €100.
The main cost driver is the number of invoices that cannot be successfully validated first time e.g. because they do not reference or have a different price to supporting purchase orders (POs).

Unreliable, often failing to spot invoice errors.
AP clerks may ignore price differences, wave through extra charges and even process duplicate invoices for a single service.

Prior AP improvement efforts had limited success

Many finance directors initiated projects that focused internally on AP, resulting in incomplete solutions that failed to address the underlying causes of invoice processing problems. Business process outsourcing (BPO) is an example – certainly there are savings from labour arbitrage and economies of scale, but its better to eliminate manual processes than merely make them slightly cheaper and faster.

Document management systems (DMS) are another superficially attractive option that look good on paper, if you’ll pardon the pun, but under-deliver in practice. Sellers of DMS, which combine scanning, optical character recognition (OCR) and work flow, sometimes convince FDs that all their problems can be solved by turning the paper into electronic images, but this isn’t true. DMS can’t parse sufficient data from the invoice image to drive automatic matching and approval, so they do little to reduce the problem invoices that cause all the work. They do, however, enable BPO and shared service centres to dump the discrepancy resolution effort back on the requisitioning departments and claim that as an efficiency gain.

AP-EIPP products automate the Invoice-to-Pay process

So why do so many companies still use people? Because until recently, the absence of document standards meant that human beings were essential to process unfamiliar invoice layouts and parse out vital information and key data into the AP system.

AP-EIPP products automate and streamline the Invoice-to- Pay (I2P) process in four stages: receiving electronic invoices (e-invoices) instead of paper, transforming it into a usable form, validating it with supporting records, and passing approved invoices through to payment (see Figure 1). Complete EIPP solutions, either from a single provider or assembled by a system integrator, will:

Enable suppliers to submit invoices electronically.
Ideally, e-invoicing solutions accept data direct from suppliers’ sales order processing systems, but they also provide websites for suppliers to manually input or upload invoices online. Solutions should include OCR for suppliers who cannot or will not support true e-invoicing.

Transform the data into a usable format and layout.
Without universal data standards, systems have to be trained to recognise each supplier’s file layout and work out what each bit of data represents from its position in the file or how it is labelled. For example, a supplier may send data in a tagged format such as XML, but the EIPP system has to learn that the field labelled ‘your reference’ is the same as what it calls ‘PO number.’ Advanced products also apply business rules to validate the invoice and correct simple mistakes.

Validate data, using supporting records and discrepancy approval work flows.
AP-EIPP products match invoices with POs goods received notes (GRNs) and other supporting records. They use business rules to wave through immaterial differences, such as small additional freight charges of low value, and route exceptions to the appropriate person for review and action.

Provide process monitoring and invoice status reports.
AP-EIPP products provide portals so that buyers’ AP- and suppliers’ AR-clerks can track invoice status and expedite as appropriate. Key performance indicator (KPI) reporting helps management prioritise action to reduce invoice discrepancies and increase straight through processing (STP). The best products include a ‘pay-me-now’ feature so suppliers can dynamically ask to get paid faster, either by the customer, in return for an early payment discount, or by a third party supply chain finance (SCF) provider.
Impressive results

After speaking to a number of companies that have implemented AP-EIPP, three key themes have consistently emerged. The consensus is that enterprises embarking on an EIPP project should:

Initiate a cross-functional I2P improvement program.
All top-level stakeholders must support the initiative or it may be seen as an IT-driven project, or a scheme by the finance department to pass its work to other departments.

Aim for 100% STP.
Project teams should consider every invoice category and envisage how human intervention could be minimised, if not eliminated. I advise clients to think in terms of ‘yes, if…’ instead of ‘no, because …’. Our best case studies found ways to cut manual steps for even the most intractable categories such as complex field services.

Focus on maximising supplier participation.
STP, discrepancy notification and access to SCF enable suppliers that e-invoice to get paid faster than those who stick to paper – which is especially important in today’s economy.

Finance directors should evaluate what AP-EIPP can do for them.

The AP-EIPP market is growing by nearly 30% per year. The potential benefits – lower administration costs, better visibility and reduced error rates – are clear. Now is a good time for FDs to learn more about the technology, and how it could help them streamline their I2P processes. A good way to start is by formalising the collection of KPIs such as administration cost per invoice, % of invoices supported by PO, and % matched first time without errors. This data can help FDs identify where there is the greatest scope for improvement – such as which expense categories cause most problems for the AP department and what would have to be done to achieve 100% STP? Above all, FDs should look for a complete solution and set the goal of getting most suppliers submitting invoices electronically, with the maximum possible straight through processing.

“Achieve greater ROI through automated business communications” :New program bases eco-savings on StreamServe’s proven ability to help businesses save resources, reduce costs and improve their overall brand among customers and prospects.

StreamServe, Inc., a leading provider of business communication solutions, today unveiled the StreamServe Sustainability Program, which helps businesses become more cost-efficient while aiding them in achieving their goals of becoming less reliant on our planet’s resources.

Since its founding in 1997, StreamServe has provided businesses in the financial services, utility and supply chain sectors with business communication solutions that meet the demanding challenges for producing and delivering highly customized documents in any format. By leveraging existing ERP, CRM and content management infrastructure that already exists within the enterprise, StreamServe offers businesses an easy way to improve customer and business communications through the delivery of highly-personalized documents and invoices in either paper or electronic format.

Based upon years of collected results from StreamServe’s customers and through consultation with industry analysts and experts focused on green IT, we have established benchmarks which help businesses achieve financial as well as sustainable returns. The StreamServe Sustainability Program offers a series of research, best practices, and tools designed to help businesses determine the eco-savings that can be achieved through StreamServe’s business communication solutions.

“StreamServe’s Sustainability Program adds a new layer to our company’s existing solutions by assisting businesses realize the full eco-impact that these solutions can provide,” said Dennis Ladd, president and CEO, StreamServe. “By significantly reducing resources, such as paper, ink and electricity – StreamServe’s solutions are enabling businesses to improve their sustainability and become more attractive to their business prospects and customers. By reducing resources and leveraging existing IT infrastructure, businesses are also realizing the quick return on investment that can be achieved through StreamServe’s solutions.”

For businesses, the StreamServe Sustainability Program achieves eco-goals while lowering costs and improving efficiencies (and thus profit); reduces carbon, toxins and fossil fuels needed for production; and raises public awareness to their environmental activities. For the customers of these businesses, the StreamServe Sustainability Program demonstrates the clear cost-savings of receiving statements electronically versus on paper; lets them select how they wish to receive business communications (i.e., email, text, web portal); and offers messages for how they too can reduce their impact on the environment.

“The cost-savings that can be achieved through StreamServe’s solutions are impressive,” said Mike Balin, StreamServe’s senior director of Strategic Marketing and Sustainability Initiatives. “For example, we calculated that if a utility company with a total of five million customers and a monthly billing cycle, delivers 15% of its total annual invoices from paper to electronic, it would represent a net savings of 70 million sheets of paper not printed each year. This corresponds to a savings of 802 metric tons of carbon production, which is the CO2 equivalent of 7,332 trees, 147 passenger vehicles, 91 thousand gallons of gasoline, 2.6 million kilowatt hours, or the annual electricity use for 106 homes.”

While initially focused on the utilities market, StreamServe’s Sustainability Program will eventually expand to demonstrate the cost-savings that can be achieved in other markets, including financial services and supply chain (i.e., manufacturing and distribution).

“Organizations today increasingly want to become more efficient, cost-effective and sustainable by shrinking paper footprints in favor of digital processes,” said Tom Raftery, sustainability analyst at RedMonk. “Few vendors have the paper reduction capability and potential of StreamServe because of its clear focus on sustainable billing and invoicing.”

To learn more about the StreamServe Sustainability Program and to calculate how much your business could save, both in terms of environmentally and financially, please see: http://www.streamserve.com/sustainability.

About StreamServe™
StreamServe is a leading provider of Enterprise Document Presentment solutions that set the standard for business communications. Simple to deploy and maintain, the company’s dynamic document composition, document process automation and enterprise output management solutions meet the demanding challenges of today’s global businesses for producing and delivering highly customized documents in any format.

StreamServe’s advanced software solutions ease the process of composing and automating business communications, enabling organizations to increase the value and profitability of their business relationships. This is done all while leveraging existing business applications such as ERP, CRM and ECM.

The company was founded in 1997 and is headquartered in Burlington, Mass., with 14 offices worldwide. StreamServe serves more than 5,000 customers in 130 countries, primarily in the financial services, utilities, manufacturing, distribution and telecom sectors. Customers include BMW France, CLP Power Hong Kong, Plantronics, and Siemens Financial. StreamServe’s strategic partners include Adobe Systems, IBM, InfoPrint Solutions Company, Lawson, and SAP.

To learn more about how StreamServe’s EDP solutions can improve the effectiveness of your organization’s communications, please visit us online at http://www.streamserve.com.

 
The Semantic Interoperability Centre Europe’s repository of interoperability assets has passed an important milestone. Two new core components were provided by the French Ministry of Budget’s General Directorate for State Modernisation (DGME), pushing the number of available solutions into the triple digits.
 
The 100th asset is a specification of “Financial Institution” in France. It is used as a standard to describe an institution, such as a bank, building society, credit union, stock brokerage, or similar business.

Other data models and solutions span domains as diverse as employment and energy, agriculture and public health.

SEMIC.EU cooperates with numerous European projects and experts. Among the providers are the European Commission itself, Eurostat, the eGovernment units of Austria, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Italy and the Netherlands, regional agencies from Italy and Spain as well as international organisations like OASIS and the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative.

Examples of transnational interoperability assets:

• MoReq2 (Model Requirements for the Management of Electronic Records)
• IDABC’s schemas for public procurement
• European Arrest Warrant

 Examples of national models include: 

• Interprana (extensive Italian model for person-related data)
• Austrian life event catalogue

As a service, SEMIC.EU gives active support to eGovernment projects that intend to reuse existing semantic solutions tailored to their own needs.

The Semantic Interoperability Centre Europe is one of the “horizontal measures” of the European Commission’s programme “Interoperable Delivery of European eGovernment Services to public Administrations, Businesses and Citizens” (IDABC). Others include the European Interoperability Framework (EIF), the Open Source Observatory and Repository (OSOR.eu) and the European Union Public Licence (EUPL).

 
 Source: www.epractice.eu
 

 
In October 2008 the EEI Platform was announced. Together with a website, an e-mail newsletter and several social network site connections (Twitter, Ning, Slideshare, Youtube and so on), the EEI Platform consist of a considerable amount of 21 Founding Partners.
 
As stated in the interim report of the E-invoicing Expert Group communication is of the essence. More so this communication should not be one-off exercises but should be part of a regular plan and process to communicate regularly, both periodically and event driven.
 
The EEI Platform identifies four segments OBTAIN+KNOWLEDGE,  BUILDING+NETWORKS, SHARING+INFORMATION and PROMOTING+INTERESTS. These segments lead the way for a coherent set of activities and instrument, combined in a comprehensive activity plan for the year 2009.

The 2009 EEI Platform Activity Plan aims at generating the following activities and instruments:

-          Best practices
Collecting and disclosing best practices on –cross border- e-invoicing and related domains

-          Common body of definitions
Formerly part of the CEN/ISSS e-Invoice workshop but now part of the EEI Platform, the website www.einvoicen.com and its contents regarding a ‘Common Body of Definitions’ will be finished, reworked and presented mid 2009.

-          Company Profiles
Members and Founding Partner will receive company profiles which enables them to broadcast their proposition, product and services throughout the EEI Platform channels.

-          Documentation
Collecting and disclosing documents on –cross border- e-invoicing and related domains

-          E-invoicing Innovation Guideline
A guideline for end users, service providers and accounting software suppliers how to effectively develop and implement e-invoicing into their existing portfolio of products and services.

-          Internal newsletter
Members and Founding Partners are the first to learn from recent developments on e-invoicing, invoice automation and their related domains.

-          Interaction Framework
An interoperability framework for the sole purpose of understanding each other in human interaction. See also the ‘Common Body of Definitions’

-          Newsletter
Broadcasting a newsletter containing headlines, reflections, best practices, documents and events.

-          Online community
Creating an online community by combining the website, the social network sites, forum and mailing lists into one single instrument.

 -          Social networks
Broadcasting and connecting using LinkedIN, Twitter, SlideShare, Forum, Youtube, and so on.

-          Website
A website containing a total of more than 200 (this year) of fresh headlines, reflections, best practices, documents and events.

Similar to the successful Dutch initiative Platform ELFA from which the EEI Platform originated, only those activities and instrument are considered that:

-          can be guaranteed to be effectively and successfully carried out and

-          facilitate and promote the Founding Partners and Members and their investments in the EEI Platform.

The EEI Platform Activity Plan 2009 is distributed to non-members on request.

Main view: to reduce burdens on business and to help Member States tackle fraud.

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