e-invoicing

07 May

Posted at 12:52h in e-invoicing, Electronic Invoicing by
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I had the pleasure of attending the formal launch of “Electronic Invoicing, the next steps towards digital government” on 30 April. The report is a welcome indication of the seriousness with which the issue is taken in government. It is also a sensible document which does not fall into the trap of underestimating the complexities of the subject. I particularly liked that, although it favours some form of overt or covert mandating of eInvoicing, it does not mandate any particular technical means of achieving this. Inevitably, when reading the document, questions arise and I explore a couple of them here. These are not intended to be criticisms of the work of the inquiry team, more ‘thoughts occasioned by’ the document and also as indications of some of the difficult issues facing them.

01 May

Posted at 10:28h in AP Automation, e-invoicing, Electronic Invoicing, Financial Supply Chain Management, Supply Chain Finance by
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Francis-MaudeIt was announced yesterday that the UK Government will be fully supporting the introduction of electronic invoicing in public sector. Speaking at the launch of a Parliamentary Report: 'Electronic Invoicing - the next steps towards digital government', Francis Maude, the Minister for the Cabinet Office, expressed with enthusiasm his commitment to see the use of e-invoicing as part of the UK’s ‘Digital by Default’ agenda. The venue for the launch of the keenly anticipated report was the Strangers Dining Room in the Palace of Westminster, London. I was amongst a group of about 50 people, experts in electronic invoicing from both public and private sector, who listened with some excitement to the strongest endorsement yet by a UK Government Minister of a policy to see payables processes in public sector automated in order to liberate, an estimated £2 billion per year. And despite the wealth of expertise in the room, we all would have struggled to articulate the opportunities with greater clarity than Francis Maude.

23 Apr

Posted at 06:56h in e-invoicing, Electronic Invoicing by
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Every service or solution provider has their USP – their unique selling point that makes them stand out from the crowd. But in reality, when you take a group of similar vendors, they're actually not that different. Electronic invoicing is just like that. To the seasoned professionals there’s a world of a difference between the numerous vendors but to the end user – the ones whose views really count – they’re all the same. So it’s actually quite exciting to find an e-invoicing solution provider that really is a little bit different. Consider this: They’re not disruptive. That's right. A start up that doesn't claim to be disruptive. In fact they have made a virtue of being positively non-disruptive. They are about as non-disruptive as it’s possible to get. That’s quite a challenge – getting suppliers who operate in a paper based world to deal with their customers electronically without demanding they change anything they do. Suppliers like that and suppliers also like that fact that CloudTrade don’t charge them. This is part of the reason that CloudTrade have doubled in size for two consecutive years but to understand the whole story behind CloudTrade’s success, you need to understand their secret sauce – the unique way they approach the market.

09 Apr

Posted at 12:48h in AP Automation, e-invoicing, Electronic Invoicing, Financial Supply Chain Management, Purchase to Pay, Supply Chain Finance by
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I've become a fan of Nipendo. Nipendo offers, in many respects, what I see as the next evolutionary stage in Purchase to Pay. Rather than simply offering clever means to automate the traditional steps in the purchasing process through things like e-procurement and e-invoicing, they offer what I think of as 'Packaged P2P'. When I visited some of their customers recently I spent time with Eyal Rosenberg, their CEO and we spent quite a bit of that time discussing how the Nipendo platform could be leveraged to offer supply chain finance. And now they've done it and the press release that accompanies their new partnership with Integrate Financial explains the synergy.

10 Mar

Posted at 19:35h in AP Automation, e-invoicing, Electronic Invoicing by
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Today, we're deligthed to welcome another guest post from Richard Manson from CloudTrade
 

Truth is truth, to the end of reckoning

I often hear the statement (usually from market space competitors) that PDF invoicing is not really electronic invoicing. Yet, in most cases this statement is simply not true. Before we get in to the details, we first need to agree on what an e-invoice is.

03 Mar

Posted at 14:51h in e-invoicing, Electronic Invoicing, Prompt Payments by
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It’s accepted wisdom that to pay suppliers promptly, that is on time according to agreed terms, is fair. It astonishes me when businesses – and it seems that big businesses are the worse culprits – deliberately fail to pay on time and seem to think that this is a legitimate business practice. But it is equally astonishing to see small businesses failing to help themselves when their customers pay late. Some businesses are their own worse enemy when it comes to being paid on time and there is a few simple steps that they could be taking to minimize the pain of late payment.