eInvoicing is in its early days. So was email not so long ago.

This is going to date some of us, but it wasn’t all that long ago that faxing replaced letters.  Then email arrived in the early ‘80s.  It was a far superior technology and before long it had brushed aside the fax machine.

It’s the same with invoice processing.  If you remember the heyday of the fax you’ll probably remember teams of accounts payable clerks punching in invoice data as it was received.  That model was replaced by something much better scanning solutions combined with automated workflows.

That too is about to be replaced by a better technology: eInvoicing.

While eInvoicing is now commonplace in many European countries, it is still early days in Australia and New Zealand.  At the time of writing (October 2022) there are 7,000 business registered for eInvoicing in New Zealand and 22,000 in Australia. 

It’s reminiscent of the early ‘80s when you’d ask customers if they had an email address so you could send them a PDF invoice.  Pretty soon we’ll be asking them “What’s your NZBN/ABN and are you connected for eInvoicing?”

The ecosystem supporting eInvoicing is developing quickly, with main cloud software companies already connected to an eInvoicing access point and able to offer the option of eInvoicing  to their customers.  With the main government departments on both sides of the Tasman also now enabled for eInvoicing some of these SME’s that provide service to government are now sending eInvoices directly to this government customers.

It’s early days for eInvoicing, for sure.  Just like email once was, however, it’s the better solution that’s on the verge of going mainstream.  If you’d like to know more about eInvoicing or have a discussion on the practicalities of how your business might adapt to and gain the benefits then reach out to the team at Acume for a chat.

Acume is an accounts payable, accounts receivable automation platform that has been designed around the Peppol eInvoicing standard.  Acume includes configurable workflows that enable it to scale for small to mediums up to Enterprise users.