Not only in the Netherlands, but also abroad, electronic invoicing is on the rise. If you do business internationally as an organisation, you may just find yourself facing an e-invoicing obligation. In this podcast, we sit down with Dennis Nap, Team leader Tech Centralisation at citizenM hotelabout international e-invoicing.
Peppol for international compliance
CitizenM hotels is a rapidly growing organisation that currently operates in 10 countries in Asia, America and Europe. This means they also had to deal with different e-invoicing requirements. In this podcast, Dennis talks about how their search for a standardised solution to be internationally compliant ended up with Peppol.
Different e-invoicing systems
Although many countries are now connected to the Peppol network, some have their own systems. Tradeinterop helps citizenM connect to these country-specific systems. CitizenM has a lot of intercompany traffic and that too can cause issues in a country with its own e-invoicing system, Dennis says: “In Italy, there are a lot of mandatory fields, which makes integration quite difficult.”
Process improvement
For citizenM, the focus is not only on being internationally compliant, but also on improving processes. “E-invoicing is a driver for us to grow. The volume is growing, but you also want to work smarter and make the process better,” Dennis explains. “With e-invoicing, you can automate a lot of repetitive work. If you follow the process with an order, the invoice is automatically processed by the system. This means you actually only have to validate whether the input is correct and you don’t have to process each invoice manually and then repeat that every week.”
Supplier onboarding
Besides the technical aspects of international e-invoicing, the role of communication is also discussed. Dennis explains why good communication is important when onboarding foreign suppliers and how they go about it. Jaap Jan has extensive experience in supplier onboarding from his role at tradeinterop. What does he think is essential when onboarding? Listen to the latest episode of ‘The e-invoicing podcast’ here, on Spotify or via another podcast app.
Want to read more about citizenM? Check out the case study.
