In the old days bloodletting was considered to be a universal cure to diseases. Later when it was realised that it could have only negative effects it still continued for quite a while. Old habits die hard.
There are many similar practises today and the guy sitting on the chair is a typical SME letting himself be subject to a plethora of painful reporting and paperbased practises - even if there are modern cures to his disease = lack of time for real business due to an uncontrollable mass of difficult to understand practises, unnecessary auditing, non-harmonised reporting to authorities, customers, suppliers, financiers etc. All causing high stress levels and from time to time give-up mentality in this by-volume and often also by-agility most important enterprise segment.
The EU Commission has set a goal of cutting costs caused by administrative burdens in enterprises by 25% by 2012. Much more can be achieved by moving away from the expensive habit of de-electronizing invoices by printing or PDFing and thereby losing most of the valuable information - only to use time and big money to re-electronize it. Once a critical mass of migration from this "bloodletting" has happened there is a platform for:
1. eventually totally automate accounting for SMEs (link the e-invoice duplicat to the electronic account statement)
2. automatically produce a realtime cash flow forcast
3. automatically link payment behavior and credit scoring information to e-invoicing, e-ordering, e-rfps and e-offers (same template poducing mostly the same data elements)
4. automate invoice-financing
5. move to real time VAT-payments - instead of costly accumulating+reporting+paying+reclaiming in case of non-payment etc
6. unify reporting codes used both in relation to public sector and other reporting - and thereby create and support also unified accounting charts
All this and more - in one package. Who could be against it? Especially with the coming nosediving of number of EU citizens in working age.
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5 comments:
Excellent idea - I fully support!
A few additions:
Automatic email notices from bank accounts based on criteria set by the user.
Email accepted EU-wide as means of official communication. State supported free encryption and authentication.
SMS and IM to mobile devices may be even better than e-mail - spamfilters tend to eat too much of e-mails and cost for encryption can be high.
SMS and IM cost money! Email is "free". Filters must be adjusted and encryption such as PGP is free.
We don't want to feed the operators, do we?
SMS costs money - but is getting much cheaper - IM is mostly free. We think we must give users the choice - service providers should price as transparently as possible.
E-mail is a bit problematic for banks - because of phishing criminals. And mobile notification is better because the device is always there.
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