e-Invoicing: The future is now! The first Trans-Tasman e-Invoicing pilot goes live.
An estimated 1.2 billion invoices are exchanged between businesses in Australia every year and most of these are still standard PDF invoices, which require intensive manual processing. e-Invoicing will streamline invoice processing, allowing businesses an opportunity to increase productivity and provide a far more efficient means of paying invoices.
Aidacare, one of Australia’s largest Healthcare Equipment and Service providers, operates from 23 locations and 50 distribution partner locations. One of Aidacare’s major customers, a large Aged-Care provider, asked them to start sending their invoices in a structured data format rather than a PDF. Problems had arisen due to the customers AP Automation which couldn’t read all the data on the PDF’s requiring human intervention, slowing down things down and creating additional manual tasks. e-Invoicing removes the need for intervention in cases like this, thereby increasing efficiencies and turnaround times for payment. Aidacare currently sends approximately 150,000 to 200,000 invoices per annum, so process improvement in this space was a key goal for the organisation.
There are many different variants of digital invoicing “standards” and to tackle the problems they faced, Aidacare investigated several methods, which would meet its customer’s requirements. In the process, they happened on a program initiated by the Australian government to develop an e-Invoicing framework to be available for all businesses to use.
OZEDI, as a leader in the Single Touch Payroll and SuperStream markets, has been working closely with the Australian and New Zealand governments to develop this e-Invoicing solution. This is a joint development by both governments created under a formal Trans-Tasman partnership and will eventually provide access to Singapore and every country in the European Union. After Aidacare contacted OZEDI, we worked with their software providers, Envisage and Promis, to deliver a simple and elegant e-Invoicing solution. This project also involved working with the client’s software provider, Basware, to thoroughly test the final solution.
After performing several tests over the past few weeks, we are extremely excited to announce that as of August 13th 2019, the very first Trans-Tasman four-corner model for e-Invoicing is now live in production as Aidacare are now sending e-Invoices to the first of their major customers. This is a significant improvement for Aidacare and a milestone for the e-Invoicing project in Australia. It is one giant leap towards a future-focused e-Business world. Aidacare has plans to roll out e-Invoicing for all their customers that are interested in increasing productivity and gaining critical business efficiencies. OZEDI would like to thank Aidacare for its vision and commitment to delivering e-Invoicing for its customers and also all the software companies involved in this ground breaking pilot.