Less than half of Ger­man com­pa­nies are cur­rent­ly able to receive e‑invoices — despite this being manda­to­ry from 2025. Insid­ers rec­om­mends flex­i­ble solu­tions that inte­grate stan­dards and enable com­pre­hen­sive, dig­i­tal invoice man­age­ment.

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In view of a recent study by the dig­i­tal asso­ci­a­tion Bitkom — accord­ing to which the imple­men­ta­tion of manda­to­ry e‑invoicing has so far been rather slow despite the approach­ing dead­line — Insid­ers empha­sizes the need for a holis­tic, intel­li­gent invoice man­age­ment solu­tion that opens up new pos­si­bil­i­ties for automa­tion and ver­i­fi­ca­tion in addi­tion to receipt and dis­patch and also man­ages the con­cur­ren­cy of the var­i­ous for­mats and chan­nels.

The intro­duc­tion of the manda­to­ry receipt of e‑invoices in busi­ness trans­ac­tions from Jan­u­ary 1, 2025 is immi­nent. Nev­er­the­less, less than half — 45% — of Ger­man com­pa­nies are still able to receive e‑invoices. This is the result of a recent sur­vey by the dig­i­tal asso­ci­a­tion Bitkom. Insid­ers sees an urgent need for action and points out the cen­tral impor­tance of flex­i­ble and future-proof solu­tions.

The rep­re­sen­ta­tive Bitkom study, for which 1,103 com­pa­nies with 20 or more employ­ees in Ger­many were sur­veyed, shows that many com­pa­nies are strug­gling with the mul­ti­tude of stan­dards and trans­port chan­nels for receiv­ing e‑invoices. Email remains the main chan­nel for invoic­es — accord­ing to the study, prac­ti­cal­ly all com­pa­nies cur­rent­ly use email to send invoic­es, for exam­ple in the form of PDF files — more than half still use let­ter post. Larg­er com­pa­nies are increas­ing­ly rely­ing on stan­dard­ized process­es such as Pep­pol. In order to meet these require­ments, solu­tions are need­ed that cov­er all com­mon stan­dards and for­mats and at the same time can react flex­i­bly to dif­fer­ent com­pa­ny require­ments.

Fur­ther­more, e‑invoicing goes far beyond just receiv­ing and send­ing. The key added val­ues include auto­mat­ed check­ing of the form and con­tent of invoice con­tent, detec­tion of anom­alies, dark pro­cess­ing if the order ref­er­ence is cor­rect, inte­gra­tion into approval process­es and auto-assign­ment. Com­pre­hen­sive invoice man­age­ment, such as the 360-degree approach pur­sued by Insid­ers, is becom­ing a deci­sive com­pet­i­tive advan­tage for com­pa­nies.

The study also under­lines that a hybrid real­i­ty con­sist­ing of e‑invoices, tra­di­tion­al PDF invoic­es and paper receipts will con­tin­ue to exist for years to come. Com­pa­nies there­fore need solu­tions that enable stan­dard­ized pro­cess­ing across all chan­nels and for­mats and at the same time meet the legal require­ments of the e‑invoicing oblig­a­tion.

Dr. Max­i­m­il­ian Schwenger, Head of E‑Finance Devel­op­ment at Insid­ers, empha­sizes: “The results of the Bitkom study show that com­pa­nies urgent­ly need to pre­pare for the e‑invoicing oblig­a­tion. It is not enough to just con­sid­er indi­vid­ual for­mats or chan­nels. A mod­ern invoice man­age­ment solu­tion must sup­port stan­dards such as Pep­pol or ZUGFeRD as well as hybrid sce­nar­ios with PDF or paper doc­u­ments. This is the only way to tru­ly auto­mate process­es and achieve effi­cien­cy gains.”

Insid­ers sup­ports com­pa­nies in mas­ter­ing these chal­lenges. With intel­li­gent e‑invoicing solu­tions that enable both seam­less inte­gra­tion into exist­ing IT sys­tems and the automa­tion of end-to-end process­es, the com­pa­ny offers its cus­tomers the basis for effi­cient and legal­ly com­pli­ant invoice man­age­ment.