The Yves Rocher Group recently launched an e-invoicing programme for its outgoing invoices. Initially deployed to Yves Rocher Brand store Partners in France, it has yielded return on investment in less than ten months. Encouraged by this success, the Group plans to deploy the project worldwide as well as to its other Brands in the near future.

Following joint internal discussions between finance and sales, the Yves Rocher Group at the end of 2011 started to contemplate the possibility of a tax-compliant electronic-invoicing programme not only in France, but also abroad.

The challenge was to adapt e-invoicing to client subsidiaries in France, with the aim to “go paperless”. The programme was first of all rolled out in the Yves Rocher France chain, which represents more than 600 stores, franchised Partners and managers, and an annual volume of 140,000 invoices and 60,000 payment notices.

The world before E-invoicing

Electronic invoicing here implied not two, but three key players: the Yves Rocher Brand, its store Partners, and their accounting firms.

Before e-invoicing, more than half a million pages were printed, representing not only printing and sorting time, but also resources and consumables: invoices were sent inside parcels of merchandise, taking more than a week to reach the recipient. Some invoices were even sent by post to inform store Partners and facilitate their cash-flow forecasts. Partners receiving such invoices then had to pass them on to their accountants.

All of this represented a considerable paper chain between the Brand sending the invoices, the Partner receiving them, and the accounting firm. This often resulted in lost invoices, requests for duplicates, and at times the need for increased vigilance at the end of an accounting year, to check if all invoices had in fact reached the accounting firm.

After receiving tenders from 6 service providers, the choice finally fell on Accelya, and the programme kicked off in 2012.

How it works

Tax-compliant e-invoicing is both done in the form of customer and supplier invoices, as store Partners can be both customers and suppliers when the Yves Rocher Brand issues invoices “on behalf of…”, in self-invoicing.

Customer and supplier invoices are now available on the portal the very next day after they had been created and validated. This means no more waiting time, and even the possibility for store Partners to see their invoices before they receive the goods, which is very useful for internal auditing.

There is therefore no more need to send invoices by post, and therefore no more lost documents – thus eliminating the former cumbersome and costly exercise of handling duplicates and account statements, not only for the Yves Rocher Brand, the store Partners, but also for their accounting firms.

Alain Lefeuvre, who works in the Group’s Financial Department:

• “When an invoice is available the very next day after shipment, when clear and precise invoicing information can be found on Accelya’s Clear’ Invoice portal, and no more printing is required, it means that store Partners benefit in terms of communication and access to invoices, and can be more available for the client. Consulting and using the Clear’ Invoice portal enables our store Partners to optimise their cash-flow forecasts on a daily basis,”
  .
  
• “We now also have a monthly summary statement file, the equivalent of the ‘footer zone’ on an invoice, which is available on the portal of the store Partner and of its accounting firm. The latter therefore no longer needs to enter invoices manually, which means no more printing, but instead paperless invoice processing and the possibility of an automatic integration in the accounting firm’s information system… that to me is one of the real advantages of this programme.”