I had a meeting recently where an analysis was presented that a small enterprise could save 12 working days a year in the area of automating administrative processes (based on migration to e-invoicing). One participant said that this is not of any use as the SME cannot get rid of a part of a person.

I protested - rather vehemently for the following reasons:

1. time spent on administration tasks that could be automated is a total waste of time (and often nerves) - the freed up time could be used on serving customers, selling, producing, developing - something for the top line. Motivation-wise quite a difference - to contribute only to costs - versus also to income.

2. everybody should be aware of the demographic trends mean that the number of Europeans in working age will dive with 35m by 2020 and the old-age group will increase with almost as much. This means that the bakers of the welfare cake will be fewer and have to be much more productive - especially as they are needed also to help the others to eat..

3. nobody should be allowed to not look at the big picture - how much it adds up to when we save energy by turning down heat or cooling etc - how much competitiveness is added when all SMEs can cut their (rather small) administrative costs in half - but above all how much more workforce can do together when freed up

4. we have really compelling reasons to digitalize enterprise processes also for tax burden reasons. So much can be saved in tax and other administration and VAT collected properly once the business transactions start using structured invoicing. Again it is the combined savings that make the difference for all tax payers.

5. accounting services can combine the savings achieved for one customer and get full time employees moving to more productive tasks (and mitigate today's shortage of workforce - as young people are all but keen to do manual keying in of figures from scrappy receipts)

So - let us make sure that we see the big picture.