by: Toni Pallaspuro & Tuomas Heikkilä
What can be done by the city of Tampere to further promote electronic invoicing?
Below is a summary of some ideas for the city of Tampere and especially for the Financial Shared Services Center to help in increasing the percentage of electronic invoicing among suppliers and within the city units.
1. Reallocate and free up resources by managerial decisions
Lack of resources was one major problem mentioned in the presentation by Nina Suni, Service Manager in..
Vattenfall in Finland will only receive e-invoices starting October 1st, 2010. See other progressive organisations at:
http://realtimeeconomy.net/wiki/show/1/Progressive_organisat ions
Electronic invoicing is typically an innovation that enjoys important positive network effects. The more companies we get into the electronic invoicing network, the more valuable is the technology for the nodes in the network. Just like telephone network, fax network, facebook etc. Metcalfe's law states that the value of such a network is proportional to the square of the number of connected users of the system (n2). I see that the only way to guarantee the participation of most companies to t..
We have recently published a research paper in which we examine the factors affecting the adoption of electronic invoicing. External pressure from customers (public and private) emerged as one of the key factors from the survey data. Other statistically significant factors were: organizational readiness, perceived benefits and the so called “bandwagon effect”. Our research paper can be found at http://www.hse.fi/NR/rdonlyres/5D5F6A47-4FFD-4CD9-A09A-9EB21 78D0E71/0/PenttinenandTuunainen2009.pdf
It is possible to send invoices with zero transaction fees and at the same time gain all the benefits of E-invoicing for the recipient of the invoice.
The recipient of the invoice wants the invoice in a format which can be read into their systems without manual processing. That is, the essential data elements (such as the sender, due date, items, VAT information) must be able to be extracted from the invoice and saved into the accounts payables system, and the work flow for approval must be ini..
We have approached the challenge of promoting electronic invoicing from two perspectives; the internal and the external.
Promotion of electronic invoicing towards suppliers
Conducting a supplier review to identify the strategic suppliers. According to the experiences of the city of Jyväskylä almost half of the incoming invoices were received from companies supplying only 5% of total volume.
Concentrating efforts on a limited number of suppliers enables a more productive allocation of resources.
A..
According to a Finnish research studying the use of electronic invoicing among SMEs the biggest problem affecting their use of e-Invoices was the incompatibility with both the customers' systems and the company's own accounting systems. Keeping these aspects in mind, co-operation with an operator could provide one solution to the city of Tampere to further promote the electronic invoicing to its suppliers. By using a single operator, the involved companies could eliminate potential problems re..
