The operators that act as intermediaries in the field of electronic invoicing (banks and IT operators) differ in the way they create value for their customers. According to the research conducted at the Helsinki School of Economics and Politecnico di Milano, banks focus on providing the market with an inexpensive way to transfer invoice data. On the other hand, the IT operators focus on creating complementary products and services to the e-invoice. In addition to lowering transaction costs and..

As we all know, by replacing paper bills with electronic invoices we can easily decrease environmental impacts such as green house gases and deforestation (calculate your financial paper footprint here).

In some European countries it is already a common practise to encourage customers to receive electronic invoices by charging an additional fee for paper bills. For instance, in Norway the fee is approximately 5-10 € per invoice, in Belgium 3,5 € and in Sweden 2 €.

In order to speed up the usag..

E-invoicing is definitely a real-time economy issue, but currently it has its downsides regarding user-friendliness. At least with a specific Finnish bank, the e-invoices come into the web bank without any reminder in the user's e-mail or mobile phone. This requires that the user (who has enough other things to do) needs to acitively check his/her web bank account to avoid invoices going past their due dates without payment.

A simple "electronic shephard", which offers reminders when an e-invoi..

Calculate your financial paper footprint. 

This is the result for a person who receives 10 paper bills in a month. What do you think of this?

We have to get this e-invoicing step done real fast. How? By asking all those who send you consumer invoices to move to e- (it will save them a total of 400m€ per year - some of that will come to you). See initiative on Facebook.

As employees we should all make sure that our own company has declared its deadline for the last  incoming manual invoice. And it should be xx.xx.2008.

Then we can move on in the RTE staircase - it is as easy as that.

Story:

The Finnish public sector - headed by the MoF - has for many years been promoting e-invoicing. Now the state-sector has decided that 2009 is the last year for manual invoices. Most of the transition will happen this year as the procurement organisation already since last year have had e-invoicing as a standard clause in frame and other agreements with suppliers.

There are 15 EU countries with similar plans - or have already made their move like Denmark, Italy and Sweden.

This means that ..

Story: Innovation become reality only when taken into wide use. "Often needed by many "is a safer bet - especially if this is building on existing user experience and trust. E-invoicing is one such thing - especially when it works "just like payments". The you get a thicker layer of user experience - and can be more successful with launches of  "less frequently needed by many" and even "seldom needed by many". All subject to clinical simplicity and same user experience whenever possible - for ..

Be a forerunner - ask for e-invoicing!

Join "Ole edelläkävijä - pyydä e-lasku" cause at Facebook. (http://apps.facebook.com/causes/view_cause/59608)

Let's make this happen!

Consumers also need an e-invoicing template.  It  would so much easier to send an e-invoice with your mobile phone  to your friend's e-bank  for his part of  the tennis lesson cost - and easy to pay. But this of course means that he should have his e-invoice address ready to be sent - for example as an SMS to you. This we need to have anyway for all small services that we buy for our homes - were taxation demands invoices.

Which bank will be first with this?

Why not to develop a simple widget application for both PC and mobile phones which would allow SME to create their invoices wherever he/she is. Of course this wouldn’t work for those businesses which requires background work to gather information for the invoice but for many one-man entrepreneurs it would work well. The key benefit would be faster delivery of the invoices which in turn could have extremely positive influence to cash flow.