e-Invoicing is dead, long live e-invoicing! February 15, 2008
Posted by Esa Tihilä in : eBusiness , trackback
About a year ago we decided to spin-off our e-invoicing business because its business model and nature of the business was different compared to the main stream business of Basware. It did not fit into our core strategy, we said. Now we could say that it was the right decision to give a focus on developing the e-invoicing business with its own scope instead of being part of a large operation which had different drivers.
By keeping it as part of the core business it may not have developed to level where it is now.
However, now we have come to the conclusion that we will integrate it back to the main stream of Basware business. Why? It is still a services business, it still has different business model as major part of software business. It is still small compared to software business. Why?
It is an important element in our Enterprise Purchase to Pay solution, providing an additional boost for automation of the process. Invoices and purchase orders need less and less human processing when various steps of the process are automated.
e-invoicing – or business transactions as I rather called it – enables many improvements in the process because several manual process steps like scanning, validating, keying, correcting of data could be removed. Information flow is seamless and managed from supplier (sender) to customer (receiver).
We do see clear benefits in integrating e-invoicing into one package with the Basware EPP solution.
EPP is the engine for processes and e-invoicing does provide accurate, right and rich content to be processed.
Once the e-invoicing service is a managed service, users do not have to connect their systems to each location separately. They could connect themselves to a service hub which then routes their business transactions to the correct location.
Some may say that now that’s done already and there is nothing new under the sun here.
What I would say to those people is that there are various alternative point-to-point technologies in place but to have a service where you are today able to connect with and reach more than 150.000 organizations to receive and send e-invoices through one connection is a huge benefit. And somebody guarantees that transactions will go through to the right recipients.
The second advantage is that the e-invoicing service can be integrated with your enterprise purchase to pay solution where all automated content can be matched against agreements and purchase orders with a very high matching rate.
It was good to have a second thought. Long live e-invoicing!