It might sound like a cocktail for a bit of a dry drink, but take around 300 e invoicing providers, and add topics like VAT compliancy and the roaming-debate, and what are you left with?  Well, quite an insightful couple of days actually.

Last week Bruno Koch hosted his annual EXPP conference in Frankfurt.  From the corners of Europe gravitated sales and product reps from Isabel, Accountis, OB10, Crossgate, Accounting Plaza and TietoEnator.  A stranger to the industry entering the venue would wonder if he were in the company of many enemies or many friends.  It’s hard to tell these days who’s partnered up with whom, and who is direct competition.

The point that struck me though, more than anything at this event, was that out of the 30 billion invoices flying across Europe today, only around 2% of this volume is B2B electronic (without a paper summary).  And out of this 2% only a fraction is pure touchless.

What a terrifying thought.  There is so much to be done!  E invoicing is absolutely the future.  Take the fact that a paper purchase invoice costs €11-32 (source: Billentis) to process and that the savings realised through e invoicing are 60 – 90% and it’s an absolute no-brainer.  But adoption hasn’t reached its tipping point yet, and with over 340 providers and a young market, you have to ask yourself the question: which ones will survive?

Join me and over 100 Shared Services Directors, Purchase to Pay Process Owners and Leaders from multi-nationals in Paris in December where we’re meeting to find out how to move to touchless processing.