Preface to Final Report
“Europe is facing major challenges in the coming years as its enterprises and public sector need to become both significantly more productive and environmentally friendly. These needs are accentuated by the relative decline of population of working age and at the same time the growing demand for human resources in health and care sectors. It is more than obvious that very concrete, determined and widely impacting efforts have to be initiated to improve the competitiveness of European economies.
Many studies have pointed out that the digitalization and automation of administrative processes hold much, if not most, of the imminent productivity improvement potential. Migration to electronic structured invoicing is the most important step we can take in this direction – both as productivity and sustainability enhancers and as a key enabler for unification and automation in procurement, payment, tax, accounting processes and audits.
The work of the Expert Group and general market developments - have convinced us that the preconditions for a determined and concerted effort are in place. This should be done in such a way that the Single Market is furthered and the adoption of the Single Euro Payments Area is supported. Further unification steps should be taken fast as processes otherwise will become fragmented and very difficult for small and medium-sized enterprises to handle.
The Expert Group started its work in early 2008 and has convened for a total of 24 days of physical as well as countless telephone meetings. Every meeting has increased the understanding of the importance of e-invoicing and created consensus towards the recommendations of this unanimously adopted report. The recommendations aim at being as clear and concrete as possible. All stakeholders should now do their part to build on this base.
Nevertheless it is clear, that the implementation of these recommendations and the fast migration to e-invoicing requires firm EU level leadership. The recommended next step is that the Commission establishes an EU level Multi Stakeholder Forum to promote the implementation of the recommendations, guide standardization efforts and champion the further development of e-invoicing into a Single Market practice. Similar bodies should be established on national level and be a key contributor to the EU-level forum.
I want to thank all Expert Group members, external experts and supporters from the Commission for so much hard work and their contribution to the good results of our collaboration.
Bo Harald
Chair
While waiting for the next steps – please check material from the EC conference and thorough Deutsche Bank report (please debate Catalyst or not aspect – yes for SMEs – no for large enterprises – but yes also for large enterprises if they understand the value of a generic toolset)
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2 comments:
Let's assume that e-invoicing brings significant benefits in the form of dimishing hours spent to routine administrative work.
Is the economy at microlevel (company level) changing so that the company has savings, but does not necessarily sell more? Or can the released, yet unused administrative work be spent in proactive sales etc?
Is there research body, papers on this subject. I find it quite interesting to estimate what really happens when (I think, eventually definitely) these paper workflow -based routines get faster and faster. One scenario is that the company gets cost savings, another is that it has some other overall benefits as well. And there's probably others too. These were the ones that were first in my mind.
I think e-invoicing has a lot of potential. Integration into further taxation, bookkeeping etc. automation; and on personal level (non-company), people can make their taxation even easier, and start to also simulate their personal finance in a more accurate way, since the availability of information is no longer a hindrance.
Why is it that the very well known (and publicized) failure of the public sector to adapt to even mediocre IT systems happened in Finland?
(referring to news, eg.
http://yle.fi/uutiset/talous_ja_politiikka/2009/11/suomi_menettaa_asemiaan_tietoyhteiskuntana_1188468.html)
Is it because of lack of visionary powers, or something else? What has been the deteriorating factor? We've got good education, we have a tradition of using computers, I think finns have been early adopters on personal level, etc. Seems such a paradox that as measured on a whole, we don't utilize machines in an information theoretical point of view.
By failure I mean the fact that in such a small country as Finland (we're smaller than many big cities in the world) we've got literally hundreds or thousands of different public sector systems, almost without a common language. This is visible in the amount of paper work. Many things are run by black and white, worn, tilted, barely legibly documents, which are then archived. When they could be neat HTML pages, filled in the network, and totally digital from the beginning.
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