PDF Invoice History with Electronic Invoice

Invoice processing solutions are used by organisations worldwide. There are major differences between countries in the submission and regulation of invoices. Paper invoices are almost extinct in the Netherlands, but this transformation is slower outside the Netherlands. Even a fax machine is still used to send invoices. In the Benelux, the majority of organisations process invoices digitally in a PDF format. A great result, but how progressive is this really?

Suboptimisation

Huge strides have been made in digitising procurement invoices over the past few decades. John: "Invoices no longer get lost, people can give digital approval, and lead times are significantly shorter. Automatic matching with purchase orders allows for a short lead time. Digital invoice processing ensures automatic retrieval of invoices from mailboxes and automatic classification and checking for duplicates, among other things. OCR recognition is often used. While OCR technology has improved in recent years, it remains a suboptimal process. A recognised invoice often still needs to be checked for errors, as the interpretation of characters remains error-prone. The difference between, say, a 5 and an S, a 1 and a capital letter I is sometimes barely distinguishable to the eye, let alone to software. As a result, invoice processing is not completely efficient. There is also a risk that the user manually makes faulty corrections."

Matching Purchase Order Invoices

Another complexity is purchase order invoices. These are often submitted as compilation invoices with the necessary number of invoice lines. In the market, providers offer rule recognition modules for this purpose, as did ISPnext in the past. John: “External rule recognition software was working, but the results fell short of expectations. The complexity of invoice lines proved too diverse for such software, resulting in lower matching scores. This leaves a lot of manual figuring out to determine which lines, amounts and quantities were billed. Maintaining templates also proved too complicated for accounts payable, resulting in additional consulting costs. Partly due to these reasons and the emergence of electronic invoices, we no longer offer line recognition. The development and handling of electronic invoices has been a priority ever since."

"The full potential of electronic invoices is still untapped."

- John Schouten, Director Product Management | ISPnext

Elektronic Formats

Electronic formats EDI (Electronic Data Interchange) and XML (Extensible Markup Language) are still applied to a lesser extent, even though they are proven technologies. Many governments already mandate these standards for certain sectors. Despite the great strides in digitisation, many organisations still have room for improvement and automation. Electronic invoicing can provide at least as big an effect. Why is the potential of electronic invoicing still often left untapped? What makes its adoption so gradual?

The blog post "E-Invoicing" sets out the five reasons of incremental e-invoicing adoption.

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