A summary of the costs and benefits associated with eInvoicing. This is for your business to consider, particularly throughout the business case development process.
Pilot costs
Cost considerations
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Benefit considerations
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The cost items listed below should be considered for a small-scale implementation on a part-time or as-required basis:
- Project management to oversee and coordinate the various parties who may be participating in the pilot.
- Participation of your business process owners responsible for providing the accounts payable or accounts receivable services.
- Participation of your ICT professionals.
- Participation of access points and or software provider.
- Participation of your business account managers for recruiting and communicating with the pilot participants – e.g. suppliers or customers.
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The cost of a pilot is relatively modest, depending on the complexity of your environment and the scope of your pilot.
Contact us for more information about your environment.
A typical pilot can be conducted in 2–3 months.
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Access point(s)
Cost considerations
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Benefit considerations
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Some software providers may incorporate access points in their subscription fees or user licence fees. In those cases, the access point costs covered below may not be directly relevant.
Most businesses would typically acquire the services of an access point rather than creating and maintaining their own access point. The costs covered below are limited to acquiring the services of an access point.
Access point cost models can include one or more of the following:
- one-off or monthly charge network connection fee
- data cost by volume e.g. gigabyte
- cost per transaction sent or received
- cost by document type e.g. purchase order
- cost by services provided.
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Connecting to the Peppol Network is a core service provided by all access points and the cost of switching is relatively minimal.
Other value-add services such as translation to Peppol specification, validation and access point automation services require organisational and business knowledge.
Peppol is relatively new in Australia and the commercial models are still evolving. You have an opportunity to help shape mutually beneficial commercial models between your providers and your business.
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Business systems upgrade and licence or subscription fees
Cost considerations
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Benefit considerations
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- Some enterprise resource planning (ERP) and business systems providers provide Peppol specification alignment and network connectivity in newer versions of their software, usually cloud, or certain modules.
- Consider the cost of Peppol integration through an upgrade.
- Acquiring the services of a third-party access point provider to translate your business system data to the Peppol specification and access the Peppol network.
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Integration into your technology infrastructure – an additional channel
Cost considerations
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Benefit considerations
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Peppol is based on open technology. Integration aspects need to be considered – e.g. your current technology standards and infrastructure.
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- As you migrate from more manual channels, e.g. paper invoices, email and portable document format (PDF) or optical character recognition (OCR) to Peppol, you can retire other channels and simplify your infrastructure.
- Open technology and integration can preserve your existing investments in business systems and technologies such as electronic data interchange (EDI).
- In Europe, EDI skillset shortage is now being seen as a catalyst for migrating from EDI to Peppol.
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Business process changes and change management
Cost considerations
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Benefit considerations
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- When sending eInvoices to your customers through the Peppol network, some business process changes may be needed.
- Receiving eInvoices from your suppliers, presents an opportunity to streamline your business processes. There will be cost, time and effort associated with supporting such process changes.
- Be aware of the impact of change to internal and external stakeholders and risk management.
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Peppol eInvoicing provides business process improvements, including:
- savings in invoice processing costs and time from streamlined business processes and from not needing to follow-up invoices
- reduction of errors from data (re)keying and OCR transcription
- increased reliability and security of data transmission
- potentially reduced payment times and better cashflow
- efficiency for suppliers who enter data into portals. They don't need to get out of their business system and log into a portal.
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Supplier and customer onboarding
Cost considerations
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Benefit considerations
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- Your trading partner onboarding strategy costs could be different from other eInvoicing channels. It might be more cost effective if you coordinate it with other stakeholder events – e.g. a new software release.
- Awareness and education campaigns to targeted group of partners would be more efficient than one-on-one engagements.
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The ability to connect once and trade with many partners removes the need for one-to-one systems integration and onboarding of suppliers and customers.
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Business and technology roadmap
Cost considerations
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Benefit considerations
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- Incorporate Peppol into your company's technology and business roadmaps. Action and monitor diligently.
- Adopting Peppol eInvoicing is suitable for phased migration of invoicing channels, with initial focus on processes with manual or non-value-adding activities.
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A phased approach to Peppol allows coordinated management and execution of the technology and business roadmap.
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Network costs
Cost considerations
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Benefit considerations
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Invoice processes that require manual data entry by your business partners will have a network cost due to inefficiencies around manual intervention to fix inaccuracies and discrepancies. There is lost time and cost involved in unnecessary rework.
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Network benefits include:
- environmentally friendly
- corporate citizenship in assisting smaller business suppliers perform more efficiently and with less overall cost.
Direct transmission of invoice data between partners and your systems:
- improves the efficiency of your network
- removes manual data entry and manual intervention to correct and reconcile inaccurate invoice data, which in turn remove friction points
- improves interactions and relationships between suppliers and buyers.
Ease of implementation can amplify the net effect of adoption in your current trading partner network and expand your traditional network.
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A summary of eInvoicing costs and benefits. Consider these throughout the business case development process. 