Do you take full responsibility for your einvoicing predictions? Do you?

The last few years, all kinds of researches have been tumbling over each other. We think we have collected over 100 studies on e-invoicing, invoice automation, purchase to pay, information logistics, adoption, supply chains, and so on. In the last 4 years or so.

Too bad that we don’t have the time, but boy would we love to sift through these researches and their predictions, wearing our retrospective goggles. Asking ourselves questions like: “What predictions came true?” and “What can we learn from that percentage for the near future?”

Oh blimey, the Forward Looking Statements

What on earth triggered these thoughts of ours? Well, actually, we received a press release on yet another research. And what interested us most weren’t the actual outcomes of the study. No, it was the tail of the press release. Called the “Forward Looking Statements”.

And these pieces draw our attention in particular (the rest is a lot of legal mumbo jumbo):

• Forward-looking statements are: all statements that address activities, events or developments that the company expects, believes or anticipates will or may occur in the future.
• You should not place undue reliance on these statements.

So, you get a report, with some predictions based on a survey. But now you shouldn’t place undue reliance on these predictiosn. Why is that? Are you going to predict something that you believe might not happen? Why then would you do such a prediction?

This sounds (an this is a phrase we received from someone else by the way, kudos) “like the kind of tacky approach misguided marketers might take”.

So please: don’t make hollow predictions and take full responsibility for any of them.

That’s all the parental advice for this year.

P.S. We actually  do have the time to go through all the studies, creating a meta study. But we won’t without getting paid!