Best Practices for Driving E-invoice Adoption

In today’s digital world, striving for the “perfect invoice” could lead a company towards success. Just as the digital economy continues to grow globally, many companies are adding a new weapon to their arsenals to ensure digital transformation: E-invoicing. Adopting e-invoice and embracing its benefits is essential for multinational companies to tap new growth opportunities. Going from traditional paper-based data collection to being paperless might look challenging but definitely worth the endeavor.

But, why use e-invoicing?

It is no mystery that the administrative cost and processing time for electronic documents are usually far lower than those for traditional paper documents. With the rise of digital frontiers and globalization, it has become a need of the hour for companies to leverage technology to smoothen compliance and make customer relationships more efficient. This will eventually help companies to have:

Wondering how to set-up a successful e-invoicing adoption strategy?

Business strategies are battleplans for a better future. Without strategies, it is difficult for companies as well as their employees to overcome challenges and grow. Nevertheless, effective business strategies could help you resolve the barriers to a successful digital transformation. A three-pronged strategy to assist e-invoice adoption in your company could be:

• Customer Segmentation: Assessing the customer and their needs could help your company in creating customer buckets that are willing to comply with e-invoicing making it a win-win situation for both parties.
• Audience-Customized Outreach Strategies: Understanding customer requirements, could help in developing customized e-invoices to improve customer experience.
• Optional Incentive Programs: Setting up effective incentive programs, such as giving discounts could help in convincing the customers to go electronic and adopt e-invoicing.

3 effective approaches to fast-track the e-invoice adoption rate

E-adoption strategies differ by invoice value and invoicing complexity which is why it is important to choose the right approach to convince your customers to go electronic. Let’s learn about these approaches in detail.

1. Push Adoption: This approach could be essentially used to compel your customers to adopt e-invoicing by default. The hard part with this approach is that it might not be preferred by bigger companies and they could opt-out to keep paper invoices but for smaller companies, this approach could play an important role in quick and effective digital transformation.

2. Incentive Adoption: In this approach, individual and social incentives are offered to customers. Offering incentives such as donations on behalf of your customer’s company could easily influence customers to switch to online adoption. Going forward with this approach includes a multi-faced campaign of communications to drive adoption, which is why it is important to keep track of campaign ROI and optionally offer incentives.

3. Custom Adoption: This approach includes custom programs for high-value customers. It deals with different one-offs and requirements that your customers might be looking for. This approach analyzes customer requests and the possibilities of accommodating those requests. Based on the analysis, customized outreach programs could be developed and appropriate incentives could be offered to the customers.

Conclusion

In today’s global digital economy, a company’s survival hinges on its potential to access real-time information accurately while satisfying customer needs along the way. George Uko, Credit & Collections Manager of Staples Promotional Products, believes that e-invoice adoption could be the answer to having real-time visibility into company data and positive customer experience.