Fatou Coulibaly - "Paving The Way For E-Invoices"

Paving The Way For E-Invoices
Adam Rombel. Global Finance. New York: Mar 2007. Vol. 21, Iss. 3; pg. 21, 2 pgs
http://proquest.umi.com.proxyau.wrlc.org/pqdweb?did=1240499851&sid=5&Fmt=4&clientId=31806&RQT=309&VName=PQD

This article mainly discusses the increasing introduction and adoption of e-invoicing by companies not only the United States, but also worldwide, with the example of Europe. According the Entrepreneur.com’s definition of invoices, they represent “an itemized list of goods shipped or services rendered, stating quantities, prices, fees, shipping charges, etc. Also known as a bill."

More specifically, the article refers to the use of corporate Electronic Invoice Presentment and Payment (also called EIPP) which constitutes the e-invoicing system that mostly large companies are acquiring. If the introduction of EIPP was not as successful and rapid as it was thought to be at the beginning (because “businesses still receive more than four of five invoices in paper format and make two-thirds of their payments with a check.”), this trend is changing now. I believe more companies (large businesses) are making use of EIPP because of the various advantages it offers compared to traditional invoicing. It is said to have become an indispensable tool because “companies are using e-invoicing to obtain reductions in labor, paper, printing, postage, delivery and other costs associated with manually processing invoices.” These companies are also benefiting of more efficient payment routing and approval processes as well as high-speed dispute resolution with e-invoicing. There has been some evidence that they significantly reduced their processing costs, and invoice-related expenses with EIPP (these expenses can result for instance from trying to reissue misdirected, misplaced or lost invoices.)

I strongly agree that due to the fact that there are a lot of companies that are better managing their cash flows, with greater amount of dollars (millions) transactions through account payables, providers of business-to-business e-invoicing services are noticing the growing number of buyers and suppliers. For example, the specific OBIO e-invoicing network states that it has 80 buyers and 40,000 suppliers in both of its headquarters in Europe (London) and the US (San Francisco). Other networks such as OB10 provide e-invoicing technology to great companies such as HP, Procter & Gamble, Johnson & Johnson, and General Motors just to name a few, that generate substantial annual revenues averaging $800 million. The article mentions couple of more networks of technology vendors such Ariba, Pleasanton, and Bottomline Technologies that are all considerably increasing their number of suppliers and business-to-business transactions, and thus their revenues because of the growing e-invoicing’s success.

Since it is more economical to receive invoices electronically, I believe it shouldn’t be only large companies that can use e-invoicing (even if they have been until now the primary and single users). I find that it would be very beneficial for smaller -to mid-sized corporations as well to acquire the EIPP features. These companies express apparently barriers such as the lack of financial abilities to afford such a technology. But hopefully with the use of Accountis company’s ebPrinter which is the Electronic Business Printer, it is certain that “EIPP is gradually making its way down to smaller firms” according to Thayer Stewart, the Vice President of Marketing and Business Development at OBIO.