Benefits of adopting E-Invoicing

Mass adoption of e-Invoicing leads to significant economic benefits and increases business competitiveness.

The benefits of replacing paper invoices with e-Invoices can be reached in two main steps.

1. Replacing the physical paper form with a structured digital e form allows the invoice to be handled and archived more efficiently. This provides significant savings in printing, postage, intra-office routing and archiving.
2. Making the data machine-readable removes the need for manually viewing and reading a visual form of the invoice. It also removes the manual work of entering the invoice information into an Access Point system. This provides significant savings in human resources and significantly reduces errors in data entry. This cannot be achieved with digital images of the invoice such as pdf.

The adoption of e-Invoicing can make various contributions to economic well-being:

The invoice process

From its creation until it is archived, an invoice must pass through several processes and steps. The procedures and the level of automation may differ significantly between entities, sectors and regions; however eight common valid steps can be identified.

The overview below describes each step and explains how savings can be made by replacing a paper invoice with several types of digital Invoices In general, the digital
invoices can be divided into two main categories, visual digital invoices (e.g. pdf, jpg) and structured data e-Invoices (e.g. e-invoicing standard invoices). The seller can
usually achieve most of his benefits by using invoices from either category but the most significant benefits for the buyer depend on the usage of structured data e-Invoices that can be automatically processed.

Invoices that comply with the European standard on e-Invoicing must be in a structured data eInvoice format.

Coliance via its Agora Managed Service provides ways to handle e-invoicing and other methods of handling electronic documentation via EDI or Application Programming Interfaces (API’s). Find out more here