How keeping it simple can help to convert 5.5 million invoices to electronic

Blog Post | 10 April 2012

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All government agencies in Norway, as of 1^st January 2012, need to accept e-invoicing. They should demand e-invoicing and with a standard format. The public sector have now adopted the PEPPOL infrastructure in Norway. This infrastructure is open for the private sector but mandating is only for public sector. This will save the Norwegian Government around 40 million Euros. 5.5 million incoming invoices per year will be converted to 100% electronic by 2016.

I spoke with Olav Astad Kristiansen, Senior Advisor and e-Invoicing Project Manager at DIFI, the agency responsible for rolling out the Norwegian Government's e-invoicing program. How are they going to do it? Olav says it all depends on making the infrastructure easy to set up. He wants to convince the private sector about how easy it is to set up the PEPPOL infrastructure.

This simple set up concept also applies for small and medium enterprises (SMEs). If you are going to do e-invoicing, this doesn't necessarily need to be a big ICT project. In Norway, there are 500,000 businesses - 280,000 are SMEs. By making the ERP solutions ready to import and export the standard format, this makes a big difference. SMEs need to use simple web e-invoicing portals.

Olav will elaborate on how the private sector can learn a thing or two about this experience in using the PEPPOL infrastructure for e-invoicing in his presentation 'What can the private sector learn from the Norwegian Government's drive to 100% e-invoicing by 2016?' at the e-Invoicing Europe conference, taking place on 3^rd - 5^th July in Brussels this year.

 

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