Last Friday, the Bundestag passed legislation making so-called e-invoicing a mandatory standard. This is a reason to pay attention—or to sit back and relax—depending on how you can implement the following three recommendations.
The law, in its current form, mandates electronic invoicing effective January 1, 2025. While it does provide a number of transitional provisions, it is undisputed that, as of the aforementioned date, all domestic business invoice recipients must be able to receive and process electronic invoices in accordance with the new requirements.
E-invoicing is therefore on its way—not overnight, but in phases and yet in major strides. Conversely, this also means that companies will have to cope with incoming invoices in a wide variety of formats over a long period of time. You’ll receive invoices on paper, as PDFs via email, via EDI, and in various e-invoice formats—from Germany, primarily XRechnung and ZUGFeRD. As more and more countries make e-invoicing mandatory, a number of existing or planned international formats are being added. The first question you should therefore ask yourself is: Can our current automated invoice processing solution efficiently process all these formats according to uniform specifications within a single, unified process? If not, you won’t want to set up additional—and possibly manual—processes for individual formats.
Good tools for automated processing of incoming invoices can handle common formats from Germany, such as ZUGFeRD and XRechnung, just as easily as existing or futurefuture international formats. This also includes a reliable content check. For example, our customers report instances of erroneous e-invoices: With ZUGFeRD invoices, for instance, there are occasional discrepancies between the information on the PDF document and that in the data record. The software modules for generating e-invoices are still in their infancy on the sender’s side and need time to become fully operational. So the second question is: Can our automated invoice-processing solution also perform in-depth checks on e-invoices for plausibility and accuracy? Simply put: You’ll want to verify in the future at least everything you’re already verifying today. Since the structured transmission of data eliminates potential reading errors, the checks focus more on content-related verifications, such as comparing the data to master data, order references, etc.
Even today, the key to invoices lies in the attachments, such as delivery notes, material test certificates, or similar documents. Unfortunately, e-invoice formats offer no improvement in this regard; on the contrary—they ensure that part of the data must now be processed in a structured form and another part in an unstructured form as a document. The third question is therefore: Can our automated invoice processing solution efficiently and securely process other incoming documents in addition to invoices? Because let’s be honest: A great solution for e-invoices isn’t much use to you if it can’t handle attachments.
If you were able to answer all three questions with a confident “yes”—for example, because you’re using smart INVOICE from Insiders Technologies— sit back, relax, and look forward to the growing volume of e-invoices with confidence. You’ll benefit from faster and higher-quality processing.
If you couldn’t answer all three questions with a confident “yes,” you should invest in a modern solution for automated invoice processing now. We’d be happy to explain the solutions Insiders can offer you at any time during a personal consultation.
E-invoicing is coming—and that’s a good thing. Whether you can sit back and relax or not ultimately depends on the quality of your automated invoice processing solution—and thus, ultimately, on you.
If you have any questions about e-invoicing and your potential invoice processing solution, please feel free to contact us and visit our Invoice page.
