The Era of e-Invoicing is Coming
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Paper invoices into the dust
First paper invoice was issued in 1504 in the Netherlands, and this form of documenting trade has been with us ever since. In the era of widespread digitization, the breakthrough for the exchange of accounting information was the ability to send scanned or digitally generated documents, which in turn translated into a streamlined overall process.
However, this process still had some drawbacks - it was still necessary to enter the received data into the accounting system, which often involved manual entry. This may not be much of a problem for small quantities of documents, but on the scale of, for example, thousands of invoices per month, this is already a considerable inconvenience, in addition to being prone to significant errors.
With help here came the systems OCR (Optical Character Recognition)., which allowed documents to be scanned while reading values. As the technology developed and was combined with artificial intelligence, systems such as the following were developed. OpenText Intelligent Caputre, which can "learn" invoices and, in an automated way, recognize the relevant fields on the documents themselves and effectively enter their values directly into the target system.
The National e-Invoicing System (KSeF) comes into force.
However, the year 2022 and 2023 will be revolutionary in terms of invoice exchange in Poland. This is all due to a new regulation that introduces National e-Invoicing System (KSeF).. What is KSeF? It is a central, governmental system used to mediate the electronic exchange of invoices between businesses.
What will change?
First of all, we will no longer have to deal with paper or PDF invoices between Polish contractors. From now on, all that will count is pure information and dry data, grouped in a predetermined and unified way for all in the form of xml files, almost completely invisible to users. Enterprise systems will generate and receive the files automatically, using the KSeF central repository.
Does this mean the elimination of paper invoice circulation?
Certainly not for everyone. Companies with foreign trade will not avoid using paper invoices, or at least their visualized electronic form, for some time to come.
Simple integration?
The challenges companies will face are first and foremost the need to integrate their current, often highly complex systems with KSeF. In addition, the time pressure factor also comes into play here, as the They should be ready to communicate with KSeF from April 1, 2023. In the vast majority of cases, this will require an additional interface, as the systems do not yet have their native solutions tailored to KSeF requirements.
One of the advantages of such an interface is the ability to centrally connect a number of different systems and distribute invoice traffic among them accordingly. This also reduces costs, since the connection uses the already built-in mechanisms of these systems, translated directly in the interface from/to the appropriate xml format.
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