In a recent survey of 70 Purchase to Pay professionals, 89% responded that they looked to be live with their e-invoicing programme before December 2010.  Impressive, don’t you think?  But in January we did another survey.  When asked what percentage of your invoices are electronic today, a staggering 45% said less than 5%.  So does this mean aspirations for December 2010 are too ambitious? 

I have been in the e-invoicing ‘space’ since 2002.  So before we go on let’s first talk ‘legal’.  Confusion now regarding legal status in countries, digital signatures, advanced digital signatures, archiving requirements, what to do in Switzerland, and more to the point, what to do in Italy, seems far greater than it was then.  Maybe this is because more vendors are on the market claiming they are VAT ready and there’s A LOT of noise which engenders more noise in your head concerning VAT…  How do you know they really are VAT compliant and will make the fiscal authorities happy?  Do they have a plethora of customers in Italy, France and DACH who can testify their VAT readiness?  This is something you need to be certain about – your VAT reclaims are relying on it.

Then you have the massive subject of supplier on boarding which is almost deemed as having black-magical qualities.  Very few companies have really cracked it.  And your entire ROI rests on supplier enrolment being a success.  But what are the rules?  Can you do it yourself?  Can you mandate?  What about ‘unique’ suppliers?  What about small suppliers?  How are you going to roll out a solution which will sweep up all your suppliers, whatever their product code, geography, value and volume? 

And then we have the subject of file formats.  Does it matter your Service Provider can only take EDI, XML and CSV?  Does it matter they are format prescriptive?  Or do they say they can take any file format?  Do you believe them?  How can you qualify this pre-contract? 

And why leave your e-invoicing ambitions with just your suppliers?  The cash flow opportunities with your customers are significant, especially in today’s economic climate when companies are gripping on to their cash with an alarming tenacity.

Questions… questions.  Need some answers?  Two events coming up offer insight into effective action in P2P and E Invoicing: Toning Up Purchase to Pay to Attain Touchless Processing – London – June and E Invoicing Europe – Paris – July.  Ahhh… now there’s some good news to start your April with.