Innovations always take time. Also in the case of e-invoicing. A few observations:
- e-banking took time - and typically some actors lost faith (did not jump on the bandwagon or went passive) halfway down to the ice-hockey stick effect)
- ice-hockey stick effects are next to omni-present in innovations - and now there has been a long break in real banking innovations (fanciful investment banking is not counted as useful). As a result of this this basic innovation rule seem to have been
forgotten,
- it is never to early to start with new technology - if you do it via experimenting. The alternative - panicky follower - is order or magnitude more expensive.
- e-invoicing is the next big thing (close to 30 billion paper or PDF invoices in EU having NO future
- as SMEs are busy and do not exactly love change it is important to inform them that it is
not only a question of changing the transport mode but the base for automating their accounting, cash flow forecasts, VAT-reporting, financing - eventually
all administrative processes - cutting costs in half
- we cannot always be sure that the public sector understand how much tax payers' money THEY can save by making this easy - lowering the thresholds and setting deadlines for unstructured material
- the first step is e-invoicing - are the tax authorities all over EU supporting the commissions target to make it as easy as paper invoicing? Or are some still trying to make digital signatures de-facto-mandatory?
- only the business control process can ensure that an invoice is paid for a real transaction - and the storing of documents should be possible with technology neutral solutions - banks should kick in with new value producing services here.
Most of the above is in the realm of payments and e-banking. Innovation time - up the value chain.