The new system should result in a sharp drop in the administrative burden both for the government and for businesses. It should also provide a powerful tool in monitoring and reducing payment terms.
With e-invoicing the Flemish government wants to achieve an efficiency gain of € 7.6 million on a total of 700,000 invoices per year. The implementation of the system goes through various phases. Around January 1, 2014 a digital billing platform is erected to make it possible to receive invoices. As from 1 January 2015, companies have the opportunity to send digital invoices to all entities of the Flemish government. By 2017, all invoices are to be received and processed digitally.
E-tendering
Earlier, the Flemish government’s introduced a system of digital tenders in public procurement. This not only ensured greater transparency and accessibility for business, the Flemish government itself realized major efficiency gains. In 2012 already 89.9% of the tenders were submitted digitally.
Direct link
The next step is the digitization of the billing process. To ensure that companies are faced with a uniform system, the e-invoicing platform takes into account the European standards. Companies can make a direct link between their own financial system and the platform (useful for companies with many invoices), use an intermediate private service or pas their billing information through a simple web application. This creates a fully automated electronic exchange of billing information between the companies and the Flemish government.
It seems that governments all over the world are moving towards electronic invoicing. It’s great to find this kind of data showing e-invoicing can make the difference in terms of efficiency.
We wrote a brief about how different european countries are advancing in this subject: http://www.edicomgroup.com/en_ES/news/3376