Rule 2: Make e-invoicing easy for ALL suppliers

Here are some facts that will put this issue into context: There are approximately 20 million European businesses. Of these less than one million have greater than 250 employees. The rest are small companies. Over one third of the total 30 billion invoices per year within the EU involves a small company, yet they have to date been neglected by many of the recent e-invoicing initiatives.

In addition, there is still widespread beliefs amongst SMEs that e-invoicing is tricky, unsafe and disliked by the tax office. The dematerialisation of the invoice into HTML, PDF or XML with transmission across the Internet can appear a big leap from printing and posting. Not surprisingly the tried and tested practices remain hard to replace.

Actually, e-invoicing doesn’t have to be difficult, is more secure than ordinary post and can be the tax man’s preference if implemented correctly. At EGS we work with many large buying organisations to ensure that even the smallest suppliers can simply, safely and legally issue electronic invoices. Those suppliers unable to create structured e-invoices on their own can generate and send e-invoices using other EGS services, including:

• A paper to electronic transformation facility where their printed invoice is scanned, the image analysed by optical character recognition software and the output file validated against purchase order and master data records before being transmitted to their customer
• A purchase-order-flip facility, which simplifies the on-line creation of an invoice using data taken directly from the purchase order. This done via a browser at EGS's supplier portal
  

This really is a win-win for both parties:

The buyer achieves the efficiencies associated with full end-to-end e-invoicing from all of their suppliers.

The supplier speeds up their bill presentment, gets online visibility of the progress of their invoice in their customer’s authorisation and payment processes and has access to comprehensive records and reconciliation data

This should make every happy – even the VAT inspector.

Next time: we will look at rule 3 - give suppliers and buyers visibility of the electronic invoice approval process.