e-Invoicing Solutions

Increasingly companies and governments are looking to remove paper and manual work from their invoice processing. Electronic invoicing, or e-invoicing, enables the digital exchange of documents between buyers and sellers. All paper is removed from the process bringing significant cost and efficiency savings.

Our e-invoicing solutions enable companies to trade more efficiently with their entire supply chain, digitising the quote-order-invoice process for both trade and non-trade goods. Depending on the volume of trade and types of documents, we offer a range of EDI solutions and can also provide custom integrations when needed.

EDI e-invoicing

We are one of the leading EDI e-invoicing service providers in the UK. For your high volume trading partners, our hosted and fully managed EDI PLUS service connects you using any message format or communications protocol without either party needing to change their system. Once connected, you can exchange a range of trade documents including orders, delivery notes, goods receipt notices, and invoices which are pre-validated and piped straight into your ERP or accounting system.

e-invoicing supplier portal

Onboarding the "supplier tail" for electronic ordering and invoicing is a common problem for many retailers. EDI PLUS provides a web portal and onboarding service to enable those suppliers who issue a relatively low number of invoices to view their purchase orders, and create shipping notes and invoices with minimal keying. The result is that the customer achieves the highest possible levels of EDI compliance, and suppliers can avoid integrating with their own ERP system if it is not cost-justifiable.

e-invoicing – dealing with those troublesome paper or PDF invoices

Some of your suppliers will stubbornly insist on posting paper invoices. Many suppliers will email PDF invoices – perhaps you even encouraged them to do so to cut down on the amount of paper you have to deal with. If you have a significant number of such documents, typing the key data into your finance systems is taking you a lot of time just in data entry, not to mention the time taken up in dealing with data-entry errors. So how do you get the benefits of electronic integration for these manual documents?

Perhaps you already have an e-invoicing interface into your systems, and would now like to include the key data from these documents in with that existing electronic feed. Or alternatively, perhaps you currently don’t have any existing data coming to you in an electronic feed, but could implement one to avoid re-keying these invoices into your finance system. As long as you have a system that can accept electronic invoices, there are ways we can help you to save time and effort.

ICR or OCR?

Intelligent Character Recognition (ICR) is now available, affordable and more robust than Optical Character Recognition (OCR).

Most PDF invoices are received as an attached electronic file. Nowadays you do not have to convert these to print form and then scan the printed image using OCR technology. You can generally process the PDF attachment directly with an automated system, thereby bypassing all font rendering problems such as mistaking the character zero as the letter o – or vice versa.

A facility such as EDI Plus’ intelligent PDF reader can be configured to read Orders, Invoices or other business documents directly from the PDF file, ensuring a significantly higher success rate. The converted content can then be processed by EDI Plus into whatever EDI (or other electronic format) you wish, ready for direct import into your system.

And if you do have to scan images of documents or other printed copies?

EDI Plus Limited have teamed up with a leading OCR solutions specialist to provide a complete solution for handling documents, not just Invoices, in Image or printed form. With support for multi-station working, FormStorm allows all volumes of documents, both large and small, to be seamlessly integrated into your own systems. We can provide you with all of the necessary tools to capture the key data from the paper or PDF invoices into a consistent electronic format suitable for direct import into your systems. We can even do the data capture on your behalf, if you prefer, or just set up the facilities for you and train and support your staff to process the data themselves.

e-invoicing - why now

Over the last few years, the adoption of e-invoicing has really picked up pace. We believe that over the next five years this will have a major impact on supply chains.  Many of the initial hurdles to adoption can now be overcome with the help of hosted EDI solutions and a flexible e-invoicing partner. Companies who have avoided electronic integration until now, should definitely start to evaluate the benefits it can bring. EDI PLUS can help.

>> Read more: E-invoicing – why now

>>Additional resources: Solutions to Common EDI Problems

Choosing an e-invoicing provider

Once you decide to switch to electronic invoicing, getting maximum participation across your supply chain will be a key success factor. Choosing the right solution provider can make a big difference in ensuring the majority of your suppliers can integrate with you in the most cost effective way. 

>> Read more: Choosing an EDI Provider