Tag Archive - B2G e-invoicing

Celtrino Exhibiting at e-Procurement Conference Featuring Minister Brian Hayes TD

 

Tomorrow Minister Brian Hayes will make a keynote address on Ireland’s future approach to e-Procurement and e-Invoicing in Ireland. This follows the recent successful completion of a multi-stakeholder pilot e-Invoicing (PEPPOL) project. The Irish public sector is fast playing catch-up with much of the rest of Europe who have already made binding policy decisions in these areas in advance of EU wide changes that are coming down the track. 

Ken Halpin, Celtrino MD at PEPPOL Conference in Rome 2012

Ken Halpin at PEPPOL Conference in Rome.

The European Commission estimates that the transition to e-Procurement and e-Invoicing within the EU by the start of 2015 will result in public sector savings of €100 billion (that’s a saving of about €1 billion annually for Ireland).  In addition, to realising savings in the cost of goods and services purchased, the Irish Government will reduce payroll costs through productivity gains.

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Posted on October 17, 2012 in e-Invoicing, eProcurement, EU, European Commission, Public Sector by
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What is PEPPOL?

 

Since the announcement of the e-Invoicing & PEPPOL project last week by Minister Brian Hayes, the Minister of State with special responsibility for the Office of Public Works there has been much online and offline discussion about the nature and origin of the project itself. In my last post on the subject I stated that e-Invoicing isn’t new to Ireland. Indeed, Celtrino has been helping Irish companies do it for more than 20 years. But PEPPOL is new to Ireland and the purpose of this post is to provide a brief overview of PEPPOL.

So, what is PEPPOL?

PEPPOL stands for the Pan-European Public Procurement Online project.

At a high level, PEPPOL is an EU initiated and funded e-Procurement project to enable seamless cross-border e-Procurement, connecting communities through standards-based solutions.

In particular, PEPPOL will enable any company in any EU member state to respond to any tender across the EU. Therefore, any Irish or EU company will be able to tender for government projects in any EU member state.

Why PEPPOL?

Government inefficiency, particularly government procurement inefficiency is the focus of PEPPOL. Less than 5% of total procurement budgets are awarded electronically and only 1.6% of contracts are supplied by an entity in another Member State. It is estimated that if e-Procurement is adopted by all European contracting authorities, annual savings could exceed €50B.

How will PEPPOL work?

PEPPOL will remove the technical and procedural barriers to public procurement by enabling European businesses to deal electronically with any public buyers in their procurement processes.
PEPPOL is a document exchange service enabling e-Delivery of business documents between government agencies and private companies.

Is PEPPOL Live?

The PEPPOL project was set-up in 1998 and  is currently in test phase in 12 EU member states.
Ireland is an active participant along with Austria,  Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Norway, Greece, Portugal, Sweden and the United Kingdom.

Celtrino is a key member of the Irish PEPPOL project and our public sector project partner is the Health Service Executive (HSE).

What is PEPPOL / Pan-European Public Procurement Online

View more presentations from Celtrino

 


Posted on February 14, 2012 in e-Invoicing, eProcurement, EU, European Union, PEPPOL, Private Sector, Procure-to-Pay, Public Sector by
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e-Invoicing for SMEs and Lack of Awareness As Key Barrier According to ACCA

 

With over 147,000 members and 424,000 students in 170 countries, the Association of Chartered Certified Accountants, or ACCA as it is more commonly known, has recently published a report titled ‘A digital agenda for European SMEs.’

This a comprehensive report based on an extensive member survey and presents key findings on the European Commission’s digital agenda for Europe and in particular, in four key areas: cloud computing, e-Invoicing, social lending and e-commerce.

The survey respondents replied to a number of questions that ascertained the barriers or impediments to the uptake of cloud computing, e-Invoicing, social lending and e-commerce. The answers were grouped in the following categories:

  • Too expensiveACCA logo
  • Lack of awareness
  • Lack of support from banks
  • Lack of access to appropriate specialists
  • No need, customers don’t require this
  • Lack of government initiatives
  • Perceived security risk
  • Too complex
  • Lack of government action
  • Lack of access to fast internet
  • Lack of universal platforms

The most notable statistic is that ‘lack of awareness’ is noted as by far the most important barrier to each of the four key areas that the report surveys on.

To quote directly from the report, “The report finds some important gaps in awareness and confidence levels among the SME sector, and calls on the European Commission, member state governments and the IT industry to actively engage with the advisory community if a critical mass of SMEs is going to be reached.”

The findings of the ACCA correlate very closely to Celtrino’s long held views that the lack of awareness needs to be addressed at both a European and governmental level. The European Union, to be fair, has been actively promoting e-Invoicing for some years and there are several projects on the go to help realise a pan-European e-Invoicing landscape.

But nothing raises awareness more than a legal requirement to act in a certain way. To this end, the Fins are leading by example and there is a new requirement for state agencies and institutions to receive only e-Invoices from their suppliers. Considering that close on 50% of the entire European SME base trades with its respective public sectors, the issue of awareness will not be a problem for long in Finland.

This report is a positive addition to the digital business agenda discussion for Europe and adds credence to the Celtrino’s recent white paper ‘Ireland is About to Become a Whole Lot Smarter.’

You can download a copy of the ACCA report here.


Posted on December 29, 2011 in B2G e-invoicing, Cloud Computing, e-Invoicing by
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US Government Suppliers are running out of time to join the race to e-Invoicing

 

Businesses dealing with the US Treasury Department will need to begin integrating electronic invoicing into their accounting systems or face the prospect of losing their supplier status. Announced as part of President Obama’s “Campaign to Cut Waste”, e-Invoicing will be enforceable by fiscal year 2013.

United States Dept Of The Treasury

The Treasury Department is expected to have their e-invoicing system in place by the start of the 2012 financial year to give suppliers 12 months to get their affairs in order and to test whether the new system works. It is hoped that implementation of electronic invoicing methods wills reduce current processing costs by half, saving $7 million a year.

A US-based provider of electronic invoicing services carried out a report to identify how well-used the technology was and found that at least one-third of respondents did not use it at all. From these results it is suggested that as much as 33% of US businesses still use manual, paper-based invoicing as their primary method of billing. The survey did however show a marked increase in e-invoicing as in 2010 58% of respondents were still relying on manual invoice processing.

The upcoming change in invoicing at the Treasury Department was not the main reason for businesses adopting the methodology however. 72% of respondents said that they used Electronic Invoice Presentation and Payment (EIPP) to increase operational efficiency, thereby reducing their business running costs. 55.7% also stated that e-invoicing allowed them to optimise their cash flow.

Respondents also reported that manual invoice processing wasted company time when entering and scanning invoices, approving payments and tracking down lost paper work. The introduction of EIPP helped eliminate all of these resource drains, reducing delays and removing the chances of human error creeping into the system.

As yet, details of the Treasury Department’s e-Invoicing system are still unclear and industry experts are warning of potential problems for companies looking to implement their own systems. However by using a hosted system, such as Celtrino’s Smart Admin, businesses can transfer the responsibility for initial investment and interoperability development to the service provider, allowing them to focus on their core business and fulfilling Government orders.


Posted on October 10, 2011 in B2G e-invoicing, e-Invoicing, EIPP, Electronic Invoice Presentment & Payment by
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e-Invoicing for Norway

 

As with many other European countries, Norway is switching its government accounting systems to accept electronic invoices. From the 1st July 2012, business will have to present invoices to the Government electronically. The Norwegian Agency for Public Management and e-Government (Difi) have selected a specialist format known as Electronisk Handels Format (EHF), a secondary subset of UBL 2.0.

The overall aim of implementing e-Invoicing is to reduce the costs associated with manual processing and payments. Similar projects in other countries have demonstrated that such a roll-out does indeed generate significant cost savings.

Industry experts are concerned about the burdens placed on smaller businesses providing products and services to the government who may not haNorwegian public sectorve access to their own in-house e-Procurement solutions. The Norwegian government however is assuring companies in this position that they will be able to outsource these business processes to hosted service providers as is the case in other countries.

But herein lies a major problem. Despite there being over 50 companies offering electronic business to government (B2G) electronic invoicing, only one is capable of generating invoices in the required EHF format. At the moment there is no competition in the outsourced e-invoicing market in Norway. Consequently the incumbent service providers are lobbying hard for incentives to produce the necessary systems. The reasoning here is that if the government is making significant savings from this implementation, they can afford to share the spoils.

Despite this apparent paradox, the doomsayers are failing to recognise the interconnected nature of cloud services which extend beyond traditional national borders. Electronic Invoice Presentment and Payment (EIPP) systems such as Celtrino’s own Smart Admin platform accept input from virtually any data source before transforming it into the required output data type.  Where local service providers are unable to meet needs, the global market can step in and fill the gap.


Posted on October 3, 2011 in B2G e-invoicing, e-Invoicing, EIPP, Electronic Invoice Presentment & Payment by
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