Nobody promised you a rose garden

I went to a book publishing party yesterday. Wonderful book about interior design and life by extraordinary personality. Lots of cultural types around and good food. And as I am kind of known as Mr. e-Invoicing the accountant present came up to me with his story – which went like this:

He: “ The migration to e-invoicing has not been easy. Lots of things went wrong in the beginning.”

Me: “Have you heard about any new networked service that would function perfectly from the beginning? And if too few users join in - there will not be any second version and even the most good-for-society-at-large thing will never happen”

He: “Of course it is so  – and now it all functions very well”

Me: “So let us tell the story starting from the present happy day –problem stories of yore have a tendency to stay  around far too long – and change resisters too often believe that progress does not happen.”

So we agreed. But the lessons we have learned mostly in the Nordic countries are that it takes time to get those who do not need ERP systems to understand that only fingers are needed to send the e-invoice for example from his secure e-bank-linked portal, that those who have ERP-systems see how important it is to check that these support the local standards properly and link up to interlinked service providers who can then convert to other standards as long as that is needed. Only then will the gates to the rose garden start to open – and what a rose garden..

But it will take time, the beginning takes some efforts and the opportunity to learn from our mistakes should not be missed.