Adopting E-invoicing And Improving Business – As Recommended By The Eu And Uk Government

By Author: Donald Nason
Total Articles: 48
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A priority of the European Union’s A Digital Agenda for Europe – one of the EU’s Europe 2020’s flagship initiatives – is to encourage the move to e-invoicing.

Why?

Well, according to the EU, paperless processing is good for the world and adoption of electronic processing helps promote competitive economic activity. In fact the EU goes so far as to say that e-invoicing is “an essential part of an efficient financial supply chain”.

The European Union’s goal is for e-invoicing to become the most widely used invoicing method across Europe by 2020 – and towards that end has appointed e-Government as vanguard to the movement, calling for electronic invoicing to be mandatory for all public procurement by 2016.

Adoption of e-invoicing across the continent has been growing markedly in recent years and is a trend the EU believes will continue, due in part to the increasing uptake of e-invoicing in the public sector in many of the member states and the continued move to automating supply chain processing in the private sector.

Lord Young – on SMEs, Growing your Business ...
... and e-invoicing

Lord Young, the Prime Minister David Cameron’s advisor on enterprise, has recently produced a report designed to “help and encourage” the increasing number of SMEs in the UK “to grow and become an important part of our economy”.
One of the most important ‘tools’ to encourage this growth identified by Lord Young in Growing Your Business is to make greater use of the Internet and digital technology. “By increasing their use of technology,” Lord Young advises, “they could significantly improve their productivity. This includes the speed and efficiency of payment. I am pleased to see Government increasing its use of e-invoicing in its procurement with SMEs, and I hope this can be adopted more widely in business-to-business transactions, including supply chain relationships.”
So what are the benefits of e-invoicing and AP automation? Why does it help business growth?

The EU defines e-invoicing as “the electronic transfer of invoicing information (billing and payment) between business partners (supplier and buyer).”

Removing the paper from the process removes the stationery, printing and associated processing costs of a cumbersome and labour-intensive manual system, with visibility and control across the whole process greatly enhanced. Customer relationships improve as queries can be sorted more quickly, and – the scourge of efficient cash management – late payments and resulting penalty and interest payments avoided.

PayStream reports that according to 76 percent of over 500 Accounts Payable (AP) professionals surveyed, faster approval of invoices is seen as the number one benefit from automating AP processing.

And it seems that businesses and organisations are increasingly recognising the benefits of automating AP.

From that same survey, the report Invoice and Workflow Automation: Progressing Beyond Efficiency to Strategic and Tactical Benefits highlights the following e-invoicing facts – that e-invoices now make up nearly a quarter of invoices processed (24 percent), and that electronic invoicing and automating workflow are top AP automation aims (31 and 25 percent respectively).