E-invoicing isn’t the first victim of standards and it won’t be the last.

B2B standards, designed to guide businesses down the right path, to allow disparate organizations to inter-operate, don’t work. They have the opposite effect. They are self defeating. They attempt to create a single agreed way of working but instead, they embed incompatibility and constrain growth and until we get rid of the standards we’ll continue to flounder. continue reading…

Germany is the biggest market within the biggest economic region in the world and thanks to the German’s decision on e-invoicing, the cost of doing business in the EU has just started to drop.

The news as reported by Christian Lanng is perfectly timed. It coincides with EXPP, the biggest e-invoicing conference in Europe, that kicks off next week and it comes at a time when the EU desperately needs a bit of good economic news. So why is this so important? continue reading…

I get frustrated at the debates on e-invoicing. The ones that go on and on endlessly about which is the right standard to employ. What is and is not an electronic invoice? Who knows best about what to deploy where? My digital certificate is bigger than your digital certificate. continue reading…

There is a difficulty in building a business case for e-invoicing. The natural starting point is a traditional paper process and there is an irresistible temptation to begin to count the savings offered by the counting the cost of paper. A sheet of A4,  an envelope and a stamp. Well it’s a starting point I suppose.

And then there’s the general efficiency saving because it’s quicker and easier to deal with electronic invoices compared to paper. This is true of course but having 7 hours of work to do per day instead of 8 doesn’t save anything. It just makes like easier.

The fact is, if you approach electronic invoicing from the point of view of simply automating a paper process, then it won’t save you a penny. So how do you go about building an effective business case for e-invoicing? continue reading…

There’s so much debate about interoperability and e-invoicing it’s difficult to know who is on which side of the fence. Indeed, if you look at it for too long the fence itself starts to move. But all will become clear within a couple of years because the balance of power is going to change. continue reading…

The banks have known about the e-invoicing opportunity for years. More than one global bank was seriously investigating the concept as a means of generating transaction revenue before the turn of the century. Why is it then that over 10 years later do we still have no bank-led e-invoice offering and why have the banks elected to ignore what is a potentially serious threat to their core business? continue reading…

This week we are delighted to welcome Torsten Budesheim Director of Marketing at Taulia as a guest blogger.

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Recent surveys confirm that e-invoicing has finally reached the early majority of users in the technology adoption life-cycle. Paystream Advisors, in a late 2010 survey found that 40% of their survey participants had plans to adopt e-invoicing. This all looks very promising and should help Accounts Payable (AP) organizations around the globe increase operational efficiencies and at a minimum, realize savings from reduction of the time spent for data entry and exception handling. continue reading…