E-invoicing is a good idea - it cuts costs, opens up real opportunities for procure-to-pay automation and can be the platform for different types of supplier finance - the problem is relatively few corporates, particularly SMEs world-wide and companies in North America actually do it. If your customer, the buyer, tells you that unless your adopt e-invoicing you won’t get paid, then you have to. Governments and their agencies in Mexico, the EU and others world-wide are adopting this approach, but the progress is still slow.

Swiss Federal Administration new rules

The Federal Administration in Switzerland has new e-billing requirements from January 2016. There will be partial e-invoicing obligation in which suppliers with a contract value of more than 5000 Swiss francs have to send invoices in electronic format only. They will accept invoices via three solutions, saying “choose the solution that suits you best”: 

• invoicing using an integrated system: most ERP systems already have a corresponding module which generates the e-bill as a codified data file.
• bills in PDF format: you create your bills using an Office programme (e.g. Word, Excel) or with a straightforward accounting or invoicing programme and would also like to benefit from the advantages of e-billing. Create the bill as a PDF file (further information) and send this to the Federal Administration via a service provider’s portal.
• creating bills online: even if you only send the Federal Administration a few bills, you can still benefit from cost-effective e-billing. Simply enter the bill into a service provider’s portal.

Digitising invoices and procurement in Europe

Austria is more advanced that most in Europe, with 64% of organisations running their accounting in-house, in which more than 80% of the businesses issuing and receiving electronic invoices. In these businesses, although the invoices are received electronically in a wide variety of formats, 48% still print the e-invoices for internal processing and archiving, while storage on the cloud is growing rapidly it is only 8% of companies.

Given this situation in a more advanced country, it is no wonder that the European Commission in a paper entitled “A Digital Single Market Strategy for Europe”, announced an eGovernment Action Plan 2016 - 2020. Although this plan is currently under development, it will focus on “accelerating Member States' transition towards full e-procurement and interoperable e-signatures”.

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CTMfile take: E-invoicing, full digitisation of the whole procure-to-pay process including interoperable e-signatures is coming, but oh so slowly.