E-Invoicing: stick to the standard!

"In my visits to companies in the Netherlands, a lot has changed in recent years," says Danny Kind, Sr. product manager at ICreative. "Every right-thinking person now knows that electronic invoices are more efficient and better than using paper or PDF. Better for the sender who no longer has the cost of producing and sending paper invoices. Better for the recipient who can process invoices faster and more efficiently which in turn is good for the sender. And better for the environment; less paper, less tree cutting, lower footprint and thus a better world for future generations. So implementing e-invoicing is a no-brainer."

E-invoicing is nevertheless not yet widely accepted. We are all busy with ongoing projects. Busy with the issues of the day. A subject such as e-invoicing is often left out of the equation. All the more so because it is difficult to see in advance how e-invoicing should be set up and what costs can be saved. And so we take on more concrete projects such as replacing the ERP system or moving office automation to the cloud.

"Implementing e-invoicing not only affects your own business, but also the suppliers and business partners," Danny said. So to set up e-invoicing, they too will have to be included in the story. And because a company can have hundreds, or even thousands, of business partners, both suppliers and customers, it is a hell of a job to communicate with all of them in order to implement e-invoicing and get it working.

Own business first

Danny says: "A company that wants to make the move to e-invoicing usually makes unrealistic demands on the electronic invoice and thus gets the supplier into trouble." For example, it often happens that the supplier suddenly has to supply some of the customer's coding. General ledger accounts, cost centers of the customer should be placed on the invoice by the supplier to make the invoice processing process on the customer's side as efficient as possible. What the inquiring customer does not realize in this process is that these additional requirements cause the suppliers major problems. The supplier's invoicing system usually contains only the legally required invoice fields and is generalized. Additional fields cannot be easily added in such an ERP system. Let alone if not just one customer, but several customers suddenly require different fields.

Knowing that every company sends invoices to more than one company, such specific requirements from one company are a stumbling block to the implementation of e-invoicing. If we suddenly need to include customer-specific fields such as, for example, the "business group number" in the UBL, supplier and customer must mutually determine in which field of the UBL this "business group number" will be placed. If this is successful for this particular customer-supplier relationship, we must hope that other business partners have not used this field for another invoice data or that the supplier has not placed the relevant invoice data for another customer in another field. This would in fact mean that the supplier would need different outbound invoice flows, which seriously hampers the implementation of e-invoices.

Standardization

The implementation of e-invoicing depends on the standards being adhered to, where suppliers and customers know exactly where they stand and an invoice flow to one business partner contains the same information as that to another business partner. Creating an XML invoice in, say, the UBL standard is doable as long as we use the basic fields. So if we adhere to these standards, as a customer you may not get all the (coding) information you want, but you may get nine out of ten suppliers to deliver e-invoices. And achieving 90% efficiency gains with nine out of ten suppliers is much more beneficial than achieving 100% efficiency gains with only one supplier, while the other suppliers continue to deliver invoices on paper or PDF.

So anyone looking to make an automation move would be very wise to start from the basic fields of an invoice. Talk about this with your suppliers and you will see that e-invoicing does not have to be complex and that the benefits can be achieved quickly.

Want to know more about implementing e-invoicing? Feel free to contact us!

Danny Kind
Sr. Product Manager, ICreative P2P
dkind@icreativep2p.com
06 261 148 21

About ICreative

As a Basware and Kofax partner, ICreative provides purchase-to-pay and e-invoicing solutions to large enterprises, multinationals, educational and government institutions. Our solutions provide greater control of corporate spending and reduced complexity of the purchase to pay process. Regardless of the ERP systems in use, such as SAP, Oracle and Microsoft, and regardless of the number of countries, offices, currencies and languages worked (with).