Chairing e-invoicing in EU

I have been appointed to chair the EU expert group for e-invoicing. It is a big honour and a big responsibility for many reasons.

Firstly it is one of the top priorities in Europe to improve productivity with this next step on the digitalization ladder. Estimates close to 250 billion euros annually have been seen.

Secondly - it is a step to many more layers of automation, better service and further productivity improvements.

Thirdly - it will eventually lead to a "Real Time Economy" - described in this blog before.

An important preceding step in the digitalization ladder is e-banking. In Finland 100% of SMEs in practise use e-banking - there it is easy to add an e-invoice template for sending and a payments-integrated inbox for receiving XML-e-invoices. Once that is done - there is no excuse for not joining - as the investment is 0 and it-skill needed is 0. The other way around - invoice receivers have no reason for not demanding e-invoices from their vendors.

E-invoicing in EU will thus also lead to an increase in e-banking - both SME and private. Further cost-savings in sight.