In general 99% of the companies consist of Small and Medium Enterprises (SME’s), of which on average 60% are freelancers and single contractors. For most of them e-mail and PDF are the preferred tools for invoicing. Regardless whether their customers are consumers, businesses or public bodies.
This is also reflected in that ‘PDF by e-mail’-e-invoicing is supported by 99% of the mainstream accounting/bookkeeping solutions (sometimes part of an ERP system).
However, a PDF invoice is only cost efficient to the sender -the supplier-; mainly in terms of envelope, print and postage savings. On the other hand, the recipient of a PDF invoice – the customer or its accountant- still has to perform manual processing. And this is where UBL e-invoicing is most beneficial.
Receiving and processing an invoice in UBL format yields significant benefits for the customer, while it requires no extra efforts or costs for the supplier in sending a UBL file. In fact UBL e-invoicing can be beneficial to the sender too.
UBL e-invoices: benefits for the recipient, the customer
By its nature, a UBL invoice automatically becomes a booking proposal that can immediately be processed as a booking proposal into the customers’ accounting/bookkeeping/ administrative/financial/ERP software.Even sending the simplest of all invoices -a single line invoice- in UBL format yields considerable time savings for a customer. And, a UBL invoice consisting of dozens or even hundreds of invoice lines, creates huge time, financial and efficiency benefits for a customer.
The conversion of a UBL invoice to a booking proposal without having to copy invoice information also implicates that the information in the booking proposal corresponds perfectly with the invoice data presented.This leaves more time to verify the contents of the invoice data or to perform other important process checks.
New suppliers or changes in supplier data can automatically be recorded in the customer’s administrative system based on the data in the UBL invoice. There is a 100% certainty that the presented -changes in- supplier data such as contact details and IBAN number will be flawlessly processed, thanks to the UBL data provided by the supplier.
UBL Ready solutions (providers) allow their customers (or their customers’customers) to enjoy the benefits of automated invoice processing; fewer FTEs, better supplier support, real time reporting, more accurate compliance, and so on.
As a rule, accounting, bookkeeping, administrative, and invoicing solutions that provide UBL processing features do so without charging extra, allowing their customers to get the best ROI out of UBL e-invoicing.
To promote the benefits of UBL e-invoicing for SME’s, the free UBL Ready was developed in the Netherlands. Currently there are 96 organisation that have received this UBL Ready label; a full list is available here:
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