According to a recent news release by Italy’s Agency for the Digitalisation of the Public Sector, AGIP, Italy is claimed to have saved EUR 1 billion with mandatory B2G e-invoicing. E-invoicing is one of the strategic projects Italian Digital Agenda and aims to promote dematerialisation and standardisation of invoice management processes issued to Public Administrations.

From June 2014  (when mandatory e-invoicing came into force) until December 31, 2016, the number of e-invoices received by public authorities exceeded 55 million. To put things in perspective in 2016, approximately 30 million e-invoices were received, compared to 1.9 million in 2014.

According to AGIP each received (and processed?) e-invoice lead EUR 17 in savings for a public administration. (It is not clear whether these savings per invoice were pre-calculated or post-calculated, making it difficult to verify.)

Since January 2017, the FatturaPA platform format – used for training and transmission of electronic invoices to the government – has been adjusted to also allow electronic invoicing for free between companies and individuals.

The beneficiaries are mostly local authorities: 41% of offices for electronic invoicing belong to municipalities and their unions, trusts or associations. In general, the number of offices has grown a lot over the years: it has gone from 30,000 in 2014 to 56,800 in 2016.

FatturaPA is widespread among Italian companies, about 30% use it daily – compared with a European average of 18% – with nearly 2 million invoices sent only by SMEs between 2015 and 2016. These data place in fact the ‘Italy in fourth place among the European countries for the use of electronic invoicing, within the DESI 2017 rankings on the integration of digital technologies.