A report commissioned by Open Business Exchange shows that
electronic invoice delivery can offer substantial savings to UK
companies, writes Eric Doyle.
The report entitled Electronic Invoice Delivery Imparts Improved
Profitability to UK Business, found that electronic invoice
delivery (EID) can save businesses receiving 140,000 invoices a
year about £16,000 a month.
Mark Stevenson, a researcher for Abstraction and author of the
report, said that expensive systems, such as electronic data
interchange (EDI), are giving way to more flexible Internet-based
e-procurement implementations. "But," he warns, "e-procurement is
not an 'install and enjoy' experience. While the aims of
e-procurement are laudable, the difficulty of getting a critical
mass of buyers and suppliers to subscribe to any marketplace along
with implementation issues, such as supplier catalogue generation
and ERP integration, mean that such initiatives require vast
amounts of effort and co-operation to launch successfully."
Open Business Exchange's OB10 service is designed to act as a link
between businesses and their partners. Companies tend to prefer to
use their chosen ERP systems but are forced to find some language
of convenience when invoicing partners which have based their
businesses on other ERP and accountancy packages. OBE's chief
executive Alain Falys claimed that this situation will persist for
at least the next 10 years, despite the advance of XML. "It will be
a long time before every partner and service supplier, down to the
local window cleaner, is XML-enabled. Even large companies will
prefer to stay with their well-tested and expensive EDI
systems."
The OB10 service offers an exchange server that can take electronic
invoices generated by any of a number of accountancy packages and
reformat the data for delivery directly into a specific customer's
accountancy system. Even the small suppliers, such as the window
cleaner can submit invoices via a Web form provided by OBE.
Forwarded invoices can also be supplied as HTML pages for filing or
e-mailing and OBE also keeps a securely stored copy of each
transaction so that disputes between business partners over payment
dates, for example, can be more rapidly verified using OBE's audit
trail.