AT&T subsidiary Sterling Commerce today unveiled its e-Invoice Gateway, a software tool built to enable electronic invoicing for companies doing business across borders.
The e-Invoice Gateway aims to tap what Sterling Commerce hopes is a growing market — multinational companies abandoning their paper-based invoicing systems in favor of electronic billing.
Legislation passed by the European Union in 2004 has been the fulcrum for that transition, according to Chris Hayes, senior product marketing manager at Sterling Commerce. Earlier legislation in certain EU member companies had obliged companies to use and keep paper-based invoices, helping those countries to enforce collection of their value-added taxes on goods and services. Prior to 2004, for instance, France, Germany, and Italy did not allow electronic invoicing, while the United Kingdom did. The 2004 ruling forbade countries to mandate paper-based processes, leaving the door ajar for companies to switch to electronic billing.
The new Gateway software is installed on premises and integrates with a company’s existing accounting software. With the Sterling software installed, an employee in the accounting department follows the usual process of creating an invoice in SAP, Oracle, or another system of record.
“For all of the normal processing that they would do, they wouldn’t see any change at all” with the Gateway installed, Hayes explained in an interview. When an employee initiates the invoice creation, however, the information is passed electronically from the accounting system to the Sterling software. “Legally, it’s not an invoice at that point,” Hayes noted. To make it official, the Gateway issues a Web-based request to a third-party signing and validation company, which looks at the provenance of the biller and the billed companies and validates that the invoice follows the proper procedures for each country.
That validation stamp forms the heart of the system — something Sterling calls the Compliance Map. The map is the work of a company called Trustweaver, which keeps its system up-to-date on the various country regulations covered. The Web-based verification is included as part of the Sterling software and is transparent to the user, Hayes said.
The e-Invoice Gateway currently validates invoices created in or delivered to 28 countries: Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Germany, Greece, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Later this year, the company will broaden the software to cover a number of other Eastern European countries, as well as Brazil, Israel, and Mexico.
As part of the e-invoicing process, once verification is received via the Trustweaver service, the invoice is stamped and delivered to the buyer company via the customary channels, whether through EDI, e-mail, or some other transmission method. The Gateway works with communications systems from Sterling’s competitors, including webMethods, Seeburger, Sun, and others, Hayes said.
All told, for the business user of the e-Invoice Gateway, the software user experience does not change, Hayes said; all the critical components happen in the background. “Where they do see a change is when the tax inspector comes in,” he said. In that case, rather than scouring a warehouse to find requested documents, a finance employee can call them up on screen through the Gateway’s search function, a Web-based search that can return results based on the user’s criteria.
Other benefits of the Gateway, according to Hayes, include shrinking paper costs, minimizing errors due to manual invoicing procedures, and obviating the need to warehouse paper documents, which can demand significant space for large global companies, especially those operating in jurisdictions that expect invoice records to date back as far as 11 years.