Electronic Invoicing Begins the Endgame

Published on: 06/05/10

The “Electronic Invoicing in Europe” conference was held last week in Madrid. It was organised by the European Commission as part of a programme of events under the 2010 Spanish presidency of the EU.

There were many distinguished speakers at the event and, in general, the tone was very positive and optimistic. There is ever increasing activity and momentum in the European electronic invoicing landscape. As Bo Harald said, the industry is now moving into the beginning of the end-game.

The presentations and debates were of a high-quality and we will covering many in more detail in future blogs. One presentation that stood out for its impressive content and depth of objective information was given by Alessandro Perego. He spoke about the various ways of measuring the benefits of e-invoicing and the calculation of cost savings experienced by organisations adopting e-invoicing.

Alessandro lead a team at the Politecnico di Milano School of Management conducting in-depth research into the efficacy of information and communication technology in improving customer-supplier relationships. Studies into e-invoicing is only one small part of this research. Their mission was to  “analyse themes related to e-invoicing and more in general the integration and dematerialization of company processes”.

Their survey involved more than 60 people analysing data from over 3,000 companies to come up with a definitive measure of the benefits of B2B automation. They found that simple benefits that arise purely from the delivery of a structured invoice data electronically resulted in cost savings of €5.5 and €8.5 per invoice with a payback time of typically less than 1 year.  Not surprisingly, the maximum benefits come from dematerialising and automating the entire business transaction cycle from order through to payment. For a fully integrated process, they found that the net cost savings were in the region of €25 to €65 per transaction. These significant savings provided a payback time of typically less than 1 year. Compelling indeed.

 For more in depth analysis, Alessandro presentation can be found at… http://ec.europa.eu/enterprise/newsroom/cf/document.cfm?action=display&doc_id=5767&userservice_id=1&request.id=0