e-invoicing Tag

Basware is looking in good shape according the their H1 2011 interim report and Q2 earnings, just released and it seems to be in an acquisitive mood. Their numbers show continued consistent growth in financial results with a net sales growth of 7.2% to EUR 53 million compared to H1 last year.

It's some time since I heard anyone claim that a pdf invoice was an electronic invoice - but people used to. Fundamentally missing the point of "e-anything" it seemed, some organisations would claim to be embracing the 21st century by replacing paper with pdfs. Fantastic! Well it would be if they didn't print the soft copies in order to process them. This is not a joke. Even today, in 2011, I know of a bank - a global bank - that does just this. It's pathetic!

There's been a good debate on linkedin over the past few days full of insightful and educated opinions on every side of the e-invoicing discussion. It was started by Christian Lanng from Tradeshift asking what free really means but it spawned into a wide debate about e-invoicing generally and the relative merits of PDF, EDI, XML and of course, scanning which some of the the purists believe, is not the answer to the "e-invoicing problem" because it requires manual intervention.

Research published earlier this year by Basware indicates that costs of e-invoicing to suppliers is one of the dominant reasons for poor adoption of electronic invoicing. A huge 46% of respondents to Basware’s survey said a combination of cost to suppliers and supplier reluctance was the biggest challenges to automation. This is hardly surprising, for years the big e-invoicing networks have loaded the implementation and running costs on the suppliers and it is now limiting further growth. It’s time to take another look at the charges for e-invoicing generally and how it is distributed between buyers and suppliers.

We're delighted to welcome Lars Kjærsgaard as one of our first guest bloggers. Lars is an International Sales Manager & Account Manager at EDB Consulting Group in Denmark and has some great insights into successfully moving toward 100% electronic invoicing. In my mind there exist at least 5 methods/ways to either automate or semi-automate invoice entry: