E-invoicing is not an IT project, but an organizational and process transformation

“E-invoicing is becoming increasingly mandatory in Europe,” Marco begins. “In the Netherlands, it has been mandatory since 2017 to send e-invoices to the central government, and that requirement will be further expanded in the coming years.” Housing associations must be able to receive and send e-invoices via Peppol by 2030. The challenge here is that you have to start setting up and making the processes for sending and receiving e-invoices available in a timely manner. In the implementations we’re currently working on, we’re seeing that ERP solutions aren’t yet ready for this—or are only partially ready.” Most housing associations are aware of Peppol, but are postponing its adoption because they believe it won’t become relevant until later. That’s a shame, because e-invoicing isn’t an IT project, but rather an organizational and process transformation with an IT component that you’re already facing right now.”

When asked what the introduction of Peppol will mean for housing associations, Marco explains: “The development of this standard has been underway for some time. There was a period when we were going to start using UBL messages, with the goal of establishing a standardized method of data exchange. That didn’t quite work out, and at one point there were many different variations of such UBL messages. With Peppol, a European network has now been created where messages can be posted. This means that the current invoice processing procedures will need to be adapted.”

Marco expects that submitting e-invoices via Peppol will happen faster than currently anticipated: “The ‘deadline’ is less than four years away, which means you need to start working with IT vendors now to figure out how to support those processes. If you don’t, it will likely mean manually processing invoices in the future—something you naturally want to avoid as much as possible and have done automatically.”

Marco sees the adoption of Peppol not only as a compliance issue, but also as an opportunity to design processes more intelligently: “This issue often stems from laws and regulations, and the result is that a technical integration is created, existing processes remain in place, and Peppol messages run alongside them. The real value lies in the fact that, with a well-designed system, less work is required to process incoming invoices. This can be achieved through effective coordination with suppliers and rich data in the message to handle the posting. E-invoicing is therefore a compliance issue, but also a lever for process improvements.”

“OneXillium can help housing associations with this by handling their Peppol registration,” Marco continues. “Our platform serves as an access point to the network and complies with all laws and regulations. For example, messages containing a PDF can be automatically extracted from an email and delivered as is. If an embedded PDF is not present, we can use our standard stylesheet to deliver the invoice as a PDF. This allows a housing association to easily receive both UBL and Peppol messages. Our platform is also scalable and adaptable to the client’s specific situation. So we don’t just forward a UBL to the environment; we can also use workflows and AI to create specific configurations that apply to the housing association.”

The invoicing process is ideally suited for automation, Marco concludes: “As a result, fewer and fewer steps will be needed to process invoices in the coming years. Processing times and the payment of invoices will become faster. What housing associations do need to keep in mind is that they still have an obligation to retain invoices for at least seven years and that it must be verifiable that the invoice, including workflow data, was the original document. This remains the same as what you currently have to show an accountant. If you want to ensure this going forward, it is important not to wait too long to start preparing to adopt this new standard.” Source: Corporatiegids