Taulia, C2FO and others have been promoting the benefits of Dynamic Discounting over e-invoicing for many years. Recently Taulia’s Matthew Stammers in his blog, Is eInvoicing dead?, claimed that if you take a company with an annual spend of €1bn, typical savings for:

• an e-invoicing would be €300,000

and

• a Dynamic Discounting programme using the e-invoicing technology platform would save an additional €3,800,000.

Stammer suggests that corporates need to change the way they think. He writes, ‘If you consider that really the purpose of an eInvoicing network is to facilitate the movement of cash--the ultimate measure of value--you can start to consider what to do with this network to maximise the value of that cash movement to the business.’

The other part of his argument is that buyers and suppliers need to focus on ‘how do we all maximise the value of the cash that is flowing between us.’ Well said. Dynamic Discounting and e-invoicing and other trade finance programmes should not be an opportunity for the big corporations to screw the smaller suppliers, instead they should focus on maximising the benefits for both parties.

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CTMfile take: The one clear lesson from this example is that it is a waste of an opportunity for major savings if you just implement e-invoicing on its own, see OB10 approach.