Why make things harder than necessary?

The ReadSoft effect on: SBC
Process: Accounts payable automation (e-invoicing)
Segment: Housing
Country: Sweden

Emailed invoices in PDF format – if SBC gets to choose.

How many letters do you send via regular mail these days? Not very many right? But invoices seem to be a different story altogether. Here, the old snailmail is still usually the preferred choice. But why is that? Wouldn’t it be faster, cheaper and more ecological to simply send the invoice via email instead? The Swedish Housing Association Center (SBC) asked themselves this very question and decided to do something about it.

SBC helps housing associations around Sweden with everything from construction to maintenance. Within the scope for their maintenance branch, they handle the financials for approximately 2400 housing associations around Sweden, which includes the processing of about 300,000 invoices every year. Most of these invoices still arrive on paper, and even if SBC has a well-functioning software for scanning and extracting information from invoices, there is still a lot of work with opening envelopes, sorting documents and verifying that the scanning is correct.

Consequently, SBC set out to increase the number of invoices they receive electronically. During the spring of 2007, they contacted their customer’s suppliers and asked if they could send their invoices electronically instead.

“It went straight down the drain.” Says SBC’s IT-Manager Nils Gothin with a wry smile. “Many people were still not ready to take the leap to e-invoices and those that were, spoke mainly about XML and EDI invoices. Now, this may be very functional technology, but it takes a lot of hand-on support to make it work.”

Simpler technology

But SBC didn’t give up. At the start of 2009, they were at it again calling around to suppliers asking them to send invoices electronically. And suddenly, the response had changed. “I think is has to do with two things,” says Nils Gothin. “Partly, it is because the market has matured and partly it’s because we could now offer a much simpler technology for sending e-invoices. You simply send your invoice as a PDF in an email attachment.”

How it works

The invoice is created as usual in a financial system or in Word, Excel etc. Thereafter, it is converted to a PDF and sent as an email attachment. At SBC’s service center in Sundsvall, Sweden, the software INVOICES from ReadSoft can read the invoice and extract all information for further transport into SBC’s invoice management system. No one at SBC really has to see the invoice before it is ready for coding and approval in the system. The greatest gains are that you don’t have to spend time on manually handling the invoices, which is always the case with paper invoices (even if they are scanned). At SBC, people have already seen efficiency increase.

Less hassle

”We want to get as many invoices as possible in electronic format and we can really accept pretty much any format coming in,” says Nils Gothin. “But I really like PDF invoices. Especially the simplicity is very appealing. The less technology that is involved, the less hassle it is. As long as the invoice lands in the right inbox, all is fine. Then the information from the invoice is automatically imported into the invoice handling system for further processing.”

What is an e-invoice?

Basically, there are two different types of e-invoices:

1. Standardized text files such as XML (Extensible Markup Language) or EDI (Electronic Document Interchange). This type of invoice is easy for computers to read, but not very comprehensible for the human eye. There are also several different types and standards.

2. Digitized invoice images such as for example PDF (Portable Document Format). The greatest advantage with this type of invoice is the simplicity. The sender sends an image of the invoice in an email to the recipient. The recipient can accept the PDF file using the same process as for any other incoming invoice.

*INVOICES from ReadSoft