The DigiCrowd ambition for e-invoicing in Belgium

Today, a mere 50% of companies exchanges invoices via email and PDF. Only 12% benefits from an integrated system-to-system electronic invoicing flow. Look at the desks of your accounting colleagues. Are they working paperless?

Although digital channels like email already sped up the electronic invoicing flow, these processes still require a lot of manual rework: printing & scanning, resending documents because of invalid fields and so on. This rework always takes too much valuable time. Moreover, due to the lack of standardization, multiple costly integrations between platforms are necessary.

DigiCrowd: community of e-invoicing pioneers

Wolters Kluwer, Winbooks, Sage and CodaBox gathered forces to boost change: the DigiCrowd. The goal of this group is to accelerate the adoption of electronic invoicing in Belgium by using the open and structured format called UBL. UBL is recognizes as one of the two European e-invoicing technical standard syntaxes. (The other is the UN/CEFACT Cross Industry Invoice (CII). If you would like to read more about European e-invoicing standards, visit https://ec.europa.eu/cefdigital/wiki/display/CEFDIGITAL/Explaining+the+eInvoicing+standard)

The UBL standard is directly integrated into an organization’s back office so the user experience stays the same while gaining more time for their core tasks. With one standardized format, businesses and accounting firms will be able to collaborate more efficiently and simplify their administrative workload. The initiative also helps achieve the government’s plans to push the digitalization of Belgian enterprises.

Philippe De Backer, who is Belgium’s Minister for Digital Agenda, Telecommunications and Postal Services, shares his vision on e-invoicing: “Every year over one billion invoices are sent and processed in accounting systems in Belgium. If these were all digital, it would save us € 3.4 billion and it could reduce the number of late payments and the average duration of payment terms. This would be great news for our economy. Additionally, it lowers the amount of administrative hassle for businesses. Initiatives like DigiCrowd facilitate electronic invoicing and enable broad adoption.”

100.000 Belgian companies before 2020

The DigiCrowd community wants to convince 100.000 Belgian companies to have an electronic invoicing flow by the end of 2019.

Nice addition: for each company that decides to start sending invoices digitally, DigiCrowd gives a donation to charity, in support of entrepreneurship, digitalization and social equality.

Together with the community, we believe we can boost the adoption of e-invoicing in Belgium.

Are you with us?