Last Friday, the German par­lia­ment passed e‑invoicing as a mandatory standard. A reason to sit up and take notice or sit back and relax – depending on how you can implement the following three recom­men­da­tions.

The law in its current form provides for a fun­da­mental obli­ga­tion to issue invoices elec­tro­ni­cally from 1 January 2025. Although it offers a number of tran­si­tional pro­vi­sions, it is undis­puted that from this date, all domestic business invoice reci­pi­ents must be able to receive and process elec­tronic invoices in accordance with the new requi­re­ments.

The e‑invoice is therefore coming – not overnight, but staggered over time and yet in large steps. Con­ver­sely, this also means that companies will have to deal with incoming invoices in a wide variety of formats over a long period of time. They will receive invoices on paper, as PDFs by email, via EDI and in various e‑invoice formats – from Germany, primarily XRechnung and ZUGFeRD. As more and more countries are making 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 solution for automated invoice pro­ces­sing effi­ci­ently process all these formats according to stan­dar­dised spe­ci­fi­ca­tions in a common process? If not, you will not want to initiate addi­tional – possibly manual – processes for indi­vi­dual formats.

Good tools for the automated pro­ces­sing of incoming invoices can process common formats from Germany such as ZUGFeRD and XRechnung just as easily as existing or future inter­na­tional formats. This also includes a reliable content check. Our customers report the occur­rence of incorrect e‑invoices: For example, with ZUGFeRD invoices, there are always dis­crepan­cies between the infor­ma­tion on the PDF document and in the data record. The software modules for creating e‑invoices are still young on the sender side and need to fami­lia­rise them­selves first. So the second question is: Can our solution for automated invoice pro­ces­sing also check e‑invoices in depth for plau­si­bi­lity and cor­rect­ness? To put it simply: you will want to check at least ever­y­thing that you already check today in the future. As the struc­tured trans­mis­sion of data eli­mi­nates potential reading errors, the checks con­cen­trate more on content-related checks such as com­pa­rison with master data, order refe­rences, etc.

Even today, the music in invoices also plays in the attach­ments such as delivery notes, material test cer­ti­fi­cates or similar. Unfort­u­na­tely, e‑invoice formats do not offer any impro­ve­ment here – on the contrary, they ensure that part of the data now has to be processed in struc­tured form and another part in unstruc­tured form as a document. The third question is therefore: Can our solution for automated invoice pro­ces­sing also process other incoming documents in addition to invoices effi­ci­ently and securely? Because let’s be honest: a great solution for e‑invoices is of little use if it capi­tu­lates to attach­ments.

If you can answer all three questions with a resounding yes, for example because you are using smart INVOICE from Insiders Tech­no­lo­gies, you can sit back, relax and look forward to the growing volume of e‑invoices. You will benefit from faster and better quality pro­ces­sing.

If you couldn’t answer all three questions with a resounding yes, now is the time to purchase a modern solution for automated invoice pro­ces­sing. We will be happy to explain which solutions Insiders can offer you in a personal meeting at any time.

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 solution for automated invoice pro­ces­sing and therefore ulti­m­ately on you.

If you have any questions about e‑invoicing and your potential invoice pro­ces­sing solution, please contact us and visit our Invoice page.