The electronic invoice program was presented by the government (Gobierno de España) in 2008. Since then it is expanding. However there is still a lot to be done. The program is aiming mainly to limit the tax evasion, avoiding financing needs and the negative effects it generates on employment and the public organizations sustainability.

Obligatory saving plan with benefits

Still there are several sectors that are not using this system. It seems that considering this the government is taking measurements to incentivize the usage of electronic invoice. Since December 2013, according to law 23/2013, it is obligatory to use it for all activities involving the public sector. According to the promoters of this law, this could not only save millions of euros, but also have a positive impact on the environment. Only in the first semester of 2013, the total number of companies that use this system saved up to €458 million .

Not yet ready

By the beginning of year 2015, there were still four Autonomous Communities that did not comply with all the requirements of this law. Either they were not yet connected to the General State Administration (FACe) or to other connectors (in Spanish these systems are called PGEFe – “Punto General de Entrada de Facturas Electrónicas”) or they were, but with limited functionality. In the last months, the situation is improving and there is only one Community (Basque Country) without access to the common access point. Nevertheless, at other levels of the highly decentralized Spanish public administration there are a lot of important institutions and city governments that are not ready for electronic invoices. Some of them still don’t have access to the entry point.

There is also an exception that institutions can only make paper invoice for sums under 5000 euro. Since the application of this law, there was a modification in June 2015 regarding these kind of circumstances. In other words, big part of Spanish administration want and must use electronic invoice but do not have proper resources to do so. This is a great opportunity for the IT companies that are able to support this process

Program for small and medium companies

Another initiative is the PyMes (small and medium companies) program. On contrary to other sector that have to pay to access the platform for the electronic invoicing. In order to help them incorporating the electronic invoice for public institution, the government offers a free program (Gestión de Facturación Electrónica 3.2) that generates the bills according to the format required by public institutions.

There had being complains from users, since the platform is not very user friendly for those who do not have advanced Internet user skills. Also there were reports of malfunctioning of the system, which is usually only supported by Explorer, and tends to produce errors with Chrome and Firefox. This last characteristic, makes the process sometimes really slow.

There has been an announcement from the government on the official web page regarding these issues. Government states that they have being working on an update of the program, which has been overwhelmed by an exponential growing of the users of this service. It seems so far that the implantation of this program presents problems yet to be solved, but the government seems committed to see it through.

About Comarch ECM

No matter if the implementation of the free program goes well or not and if all public institutions will start using there is a huge opportunity to introduce a proper ECM to Spanish auditory. The solution makes it possible to simplify and automate document flow processes and maintain compliance with legal requirements. Comarch ECM has been implemented for the companies dealing with huge amount of documents.

It has been implemented for many worldwide known companies such as: Technicolor, Valeo, Carrefour, Ahold, Nestle Waters and Valeant. Comarch offers solution for scanning documents, reading data from them and saving them in ECM system. From paper document data is read by intelligent (self-improving) OCR (Optical Character Recognition). Use of the process engine accelerates the acceptance of documents and collects data entered at every stage of the process. Comarch ECM enables monitoring of deadlines and e-mail notifications, integration with internal and external business systems such as ERP, EDI, Acitve Directory, use of multiple sources of document input (tax, email, scan, upload). Thanks to this, the accounting staff can focus solely on verification and particularization of the entered assignment.

Comarch is a company that has 22 year of experience in IT industry. It operates worldwide and had completed over 3000 projects in more than 40 countries. Comarch has recently established his office in Santiago de Chile and is now introducing its product Comarch ECM into Spanish and Latin American market. For more information please visit our website http://www.comarch.com/trade-and-services/our-solutions/comarch-ecm/ and consult one of our experienced Business Solution Managers.