Last Fri­day, the Ger­man par­lia­ment passed e‑invoicing as a manda­to­ry stan­dard. A rea­son to sit up and take notice or sit back and relax — depend­ing on how you can imple­ment the fol­low­ing three rec­om­men­da­tions.

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The law in its cur­rent form pro­vides for a fun­da­men­tal oblig­a­tion to issue invoic­es elec­tron­i­cal­ly from 1 Jan­u­ary 2025. Although it offers a num­ber of tran­si­tion­al pro­vi­sions, it is undis­put­ed that from this date, all domes­tic busi­ness invoice recip­i­ents must be able to receive and process elec­tron­ic invoic­es in accor­dance with the new require­ments.

The e‑invoice is there­fore com­ing — not overnight, but stag­gered over time and yet in large steps. Con­verse­ly, this also means that com­pa­nies will have to deal with incom­ing invoic­es in a wide vari­ety of for­mats over a long peri­od of time. They will receive invoic­es on paper, as PDFs by email, via EDI and in var­i­ous e‑invoice for­mats — from Ger­many, pri­mar­i­ly XRech­nung and ZUGFeRD. As more and more coun­tries are mak­ing e‑invoicing manda­to­ry, a num­ber of exist­ing or planned inter­na­tion­al for­mats are being added. The first ques­tion you should there­fore ask your­self is: Can our cur­rent solu­tion for auto­mat­ed invoice pro­cess­ing effi­cient­ly process all these for­mats accord­ing to stan­dard­ised spec­i­fi­ca­tions in a com­mon process? If not, you will not want to ini­ti­ate addi­tion­al — pos­si­bly man­u­al — process­es for indi­vid­ual for­mats.

Good tools for the auto­mat­ed pro­cess­ing of incom­ing invoic­es can process com­mon for­mats from Ger­many such as ZUGFeRD and XRech­nung just as eas­i­ly as exist­ing or future inter­na­tion­al for­mats. This also includes a reli­able con­tent check. Our cus­tomers report the occur­rence of incor­rect e‑invoices: For exam­ple, with ZUGFeRD invoic­es, there are always dis­crep­an­cies between the infor­ma­tion on the PDF doc­u­ment and in the data record. The soft­ware mod­ules for cre­at­ing e‑invoices are still young on the sender side and need to famil­iarise them­selves first. So the sec­ond ques­tion is: Can our solu­tion for auto­mat­ed invoice pro­cess­ing also check e‑invoices in depth for plau­si­bil­i­ty and cor­rect­ness? To put it sim­ply: you will want to check at least every­thing that you already check today in the future. As the struc­tured trans­mis­sion of data elim­i­nates poten­tial read­ing errors, the checks con­cen­trate more on con­tent-relat­ed checks such as com­par­i­son with mas­ter data, order ref­er­ences, etc.

Even today, the music in invoic­es also plays in the attach­ments such as deliv­ery notes, mate­r­i­al test cer­tifi­cates or sim­i­lar. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, e‑invoice for­mats do not offer any improve­ment here — on the con­trary, they ensure that part of the data now has to be processed in struc­tured form and anoth­er part in unstruc­tured form as a doc­u­ment. The third ques­tion is there­fore: Can our solu­tion for auto­mat­ed invoice pro­cess­ing also process oth­er incom­ing doc­u­ments in addi­tion to invoic­es effi­cient­ly and secure­ly? Because let’s be hon­est: a great solu­tion for e‑invoices is of lit­tle use if it capit­u­lates to attach­ments.

If you can answer all three ques­tions with a resound­ing yes, for exam­ple because you are using smart INVOICE from Insid­ers Tech­nolo­gies, you can sit back, relax and look for­ward to the grow­ing vol­ume of e‑invoices. You will ben­e­fit from faster and bet­ter qual­i­ty pro­cess­ing.

If you could­n’t answer all three ques­tions with a resound­ing yes, now is the time to pur­chase a mod­ern solu­tion for auto­mat­ed invoice pro­cess­ing. We will be hap­py to explain which solu­tions Insid­ers can offer you in a per­son­al meet­ing at any time.

E‑invoicing is com­ing and that’s a good thing. Whether you can sit back and relax or not ulti­mate­ly depends on the qual­i­ty of your solu­tion for auto­mat­ed invoice pro­cess­ing and there­fore ulti­mate­ly on you.

If you have any ques­tions about e‑invoicing and your poten­tial invoice pro­cess­ing solu­tion, please con­tact us and vis­it our Invoice page.