E-invoicing in the modern workplace

The modern workplace is constantly evolving. Current trends show many businesses shifting to outcomes and results-based metrics rather than hours worked, moving away from office spaces to home-based workforces, and transforming their engagement models with customers, suppliers and staff alike.  

While digital transformation may have begun with a more literal goal of transforming analogue assets and processes into digital ones, the term has since come to have a more holistic meaning that incorporates experiences and outcomes as well as technology. It relates not just to the technical tools a business uses, but also to the business culture of its people and adapting to a ‘digital first’ mindset. These changes require new tools to enable not just how a business functions, but also how we communicate and transact with each other. 

For hundreds of years, invoices have used paper as the vehicle for communicating transactional data between trading partners. So much so that even in more recent times when emailing a digital invoice became the norm, the files being emailed were still designed and created with that piece of paper in mind for potential future printing. With the ubiquitousness of emailed invoices and the comparative frustrations to manual paper-handling came the rise of the Accounts Payable (AP) Automation solution.

AP Automation has been about using a Digital Transformation mindset and technical toolkits to improve the way that an organisation processes invoices. It focuses on how to get applications to take the information formatted for human interpretation and then do digitally what historically people have done manually. However, the base assumption of changing the invoice itself has been left largely unchallenged unless you were a larger organisation intent on developing EDI. Peppol e-invoicing is about transforming the invoice itself. It's about improving the way the information is communicated knowing that the information the invoice contains will end up in an electronic system rather than a physical filing cabinet.

Peppol e-invoicing enables automation more efficiently and effectively than traditional OCR based capture methods because it is a transfer of data rather than the reinterpretation of data from a document. It provides a seamless exchange of information that isn’t reliant on email inboxes and removes the last vestiges of manual complexity.  

This makes Peppol e-invoicing an essential element of the modern workplace as it provides the speed and accuracy demanded by outcome-driven metrics. It provides the security necessitated by remote and WFH business models. And it helps speed up payment times which in turn helps to improve cashflow during this critical economic recovery.

Kris Elliott

Sales Manager – AUS/NZ