Many Businesses Failing to Realise Benefits of E-invoicing

A report examining the adoption of e-invoicing has found that many businesses and government organisations are failing to realise the benefits of e-invoicing. The ‘E-Invoicing/E-Billing International Market Overview and Forecast’ report from Billentis projected that of the 500 billion invoices that organisations will send globally this year only 28 billion of these B2B and B2G invoices will be sent electronically in 2016.

Given the well-documented errors that arise through the use of physical invoices, and the increasing adoption of digital solutions, it is somewhat surprising that, as a proportion, the number of invoices sent electronically won’t be higher this year. Aside from reducing accounting mistakes, e-invoicing delivers a wide range of business benefits, including improved efficiency and cost-savings from eliminating paper based processes.

By deploying e-invoicing solutions organisations can reduce, and even totally eliminate, paper based processes. This would enable them to realise significant cost savings and improve efficiency by removing time-consuming processes, such as data entry, printing and sending invoices and manually matching invoices to orders. By going one step further and integrating e-invoicing solutions with an electronic purchase and payment system businesses can realise further benefits. By providing e-catalogues companies have more control over business spending and can enforce procurement policies, while electronic payments offer a more cost effective and efficient way to conduct business.

It’s clear, that despite governments globally mandating e-invoicing, there is still a long way to go before it and fully automated purchase-to-pay solutions are standard business practice. And as a result many organisations are yet to realise the benefits that P2P solutions, such as Palette E-invoice, can deliver.