The Netherlands is further ahead with e-invoicing than abroad, headlined a May 4 article on Accountant.nl. The platform based itself on the recently released report "Trends in Export 2018. Nice news for the profession, I thought. Curious, I downloaded the report to read more about it here. Upon closer examination of the charts, however, I looked at it a little differently.
By Danny Kind, e-invoicing product manager at ICreative
While the headline of the article adamantly claims that we in the Netherlands are further ahead than abroad, it turns out that the survey asked 4,000 exporters as a question. To this, 41 percent answered in the affirmative. So on balance the majority doubts whether we are further ahead than abroad: 31 percent have no idea, 25 percent think there is no difference and a small group of 4 percent believe we are less advanced. So unfortunately the reality is a little less rosy than the headline of the article suggests. Although 41 percent is still quite significant.
Looking further, I wondered what definition of "e-invoicing" the researchers used. Meanwhile, the generally accepted definition of an e-invoice is that it consists of a structured data format (e.g., XML). So that means pdf invoices are not e-invoices. On the other hand, the research also uses the term "digital invoicing. The definition of this is a pdf invoice that usually reaches the customer via e-mail. So these terms are not synonymous but are often used interchangeably.
Confusion
Confusion then lurks, and survey respondents may well have been unaware of this difference when answering the question of whether or not they invoice digitally. When asked this question, 81 percent indicated that they invoice digitally, but this is translated in the accompanying graph to the fact that 81 percent invoice electronically. And surely these are really two different quantities.
If you assume that in the export sector 81 percent of suppliers invoice digitally (i.e., with a pdf invoice via e-mail), this could immediately explain why payment is not faster. After all, pdf invoices have to go through almost the same steps as paper invoices to be approved by the customer. Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology and the associated manual labor are time-consuming and error-prone. It does not speed up the approval and payment of invoices.
Faster payment
'Real' e-invoices can provide that faster payment, though. This is because invoices can be imported as structured data from one system directly into another. However, this is not enough to get invoices paid faster. After all, they still have to be approved by the customer before they can be paid.
With smart techniques such as matching invoices against orders and goods receipts, approval can be automated. However, this requires something of a customer. For example, complete and correct orders must always be recorded in the ordering system. Regularly, the techniques for this are in place but are so unfriendly to use that employees hate to record an order for every order.
Also, suppliers must include correct and complete header and line information on the invoice to compare it with the lines as recorded by the customer in the order. All in all, then, there are quite a few prerequisites for getting an e-invoice paid faster. It requires a bit from the organizations but the benefits are huge for both parties. So still great news for the field.