The delay in implementing the digital agenda costs Italy EUR 1 billion per month, according to estimates by the Digital Agenda Observatory of the School of Management of the Milan Polytechnic. It said adopting electronic invoicing for public administration could lead to a saving of EUR 1.1 billion per year, while the introduction of IT services in health care could generate savings of EUR 6.5 billion per year.
Read MoreSebastian Christow, Director of Electronic Economy, Department of the Polish Ministry of Economy, revealed at the EXPP Summit that Poland is to adopt PEPPOL for B2G e-invoicing After Norway, Denmark, Sweden, France, Italy, Austria, Ireland, Poland is the next country to implement PEPPOL. Though the PEPPOL project ended last year, the results are now administered in the OpenPEPPOL community.
After one year of operation, the OpenPEPPOL Association counts almost 80 member organisations from the private and public sector across 17 countries, with over 60 Access Point providers. Read More
Basware will deliver AP Automation services to Tele2 Norge AS, a Norwegian provider of telecommunication services. The acquired services are powered by Alusta, Basware's unified cloud-based platform for Purchase-to-Pay. The specific Basware services to be delivered include Invoice Automation, Scan & Capture, Supplier Activation and Supplier Portal. The value of the agreement is approximately EUR 300,000 over the next three years. The services will be implemented during the second half of the year.
Read MoreThere probably is no such thing as coincidence. First, the European Commission published a report estimating €193 billion in VAT revenues (1.5% of GDP) were lost due to non-compliance or non-collection in 2011. Second, A.T. Kearney in association with Visa and Dr. Friedrich Schneider published there yearly report called "The Shadow Economy in Europe", which looks at the “legal business activities that are performed outside the reach of government authorities.”
Together both reports state that electronic invoicing could help governments to contain tax evasion and the shadow economy. Is that so?. let's take a thorough look at that.
In a series of posts Mikkel Hippe Brun from Tradeshift discusses the new EU B2G e-procurement and e-invoicing directive. Mikkel makes the comparison to the successful PEPPOL infrastructure and wonders why the draft directive on B2G e-procurement and e-invoicing calls for a blank slate – effectively ignoring the success and hard work of several member states in demonstrating a scalable solution for Europe.
Mikkel also takes a look at the success of the GSM standard in Europe and what it meant for the European telco industry. And between the lines you can read about the danger that just like SEPA, the EU gets stuck with a pan European system that throws away the efficiencies, first mover advantages and great lessons learned by the Nordics.
Formpipe has been chosen as vendor for the Danish SKI frame agreement regarding IT Solutions and Maintenance. SKI expects the agreement to be worth 1,2 billion Danish Krones, 160 million Euro. The entire SKI frame agreement consists of 18 sub-agreements. Formpipe decided to bid for three; Case and Document Management, Collaboration and Digital Self Service, and was top rated in all three of them.
SKI frame agreement is a central agreement, available for all public agencies, ministries, regions and municipalities enabling clients easier access to vendors and offerings. This agreement replaces the previous agreement that expired February 2012.
Ricoh Europe's dedication to pushing the boundaries of environmental sustainability in print has resulted in it becoming the first organisation to achieve certification of compliance with the new global ISO 16759 standard for ‘Quantification and communication for calculating the carbon footprint of print media products.’ This certification recognises the accuracy of Ricoh's innovative carbon calculator which has been available through Ricoh's Carbon Balanced Printing Programme.
And even though we are all looking for ways to achieve 100% digital invoices, as long as there will be paper invoices, they'd better be as green as possible!
Hail, hail ComReg! The Irish ComReg (Commission for Communications Regulation) quite probably is at the forefront of consumer protection when it comes to e-billing adoption. In this case communications provider EirCom began changing customers to e-billing. Even though EirCom notified the affected customers on three separate occasions, under ComReg rules EirCom should have given its customers the chance to reject or opt out of it.
ComReg stated that the implementation of the online billing represented a change to the customers’ contracts, and that EirCom had not complied with its statutory obligations by the Universal Service Regulations to notify customers of such modifications.
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.
According to the European Commission, a 25 percent reduction in administrative costs for businesses could see the country’s GDP rise by 0.8 percent in the short term and 1.4 percent in the long term. This should have help the French finance Minister Pierre Moscovici when he announced announced a series of measures that are aimedto simplify live for SME's.
One of the measures is to “facilitate relationships between business and government” by the development of online billing and high security systems for online payments.
