Real-Time Economy Community - New ideas

New reporting code will be launched on September 9th 2010

Saila Toikka — Mon, 23 Aug 2010 14:50:13 GMT

Jyrki Poteri from Tieto and Vuokko Mäkinen from Hawcon are telling about the new reporting code in Kauppalehti (20^th August, 2010). The new reporting code aims to ease accountant's work and to harmonize reporting practices in Finland.

Kauppalehti article in full lenght (in Finnish) available at

http://www.kauppalehti.fi/5/i/yritykset/yritysuutiset/?oid=20100812969#kommentit

Leading analyst selects Maventa as Cool Vendor 2010

Kim Forsman — Wed, 02 Jun 2010 10:31:51 GMT

Maventa, one of the fastest growing electronic invoicing service providers in the world, today announced that leading analyst firm Gartner has named Maventa as a Cool Vendor in their newly released report on Multi-enterprise B2B.

Vendors selected for the Cool Vendor report are “innovative, impactful and intriguing”

Maventa’s award winning Software-as-a-Service solution makes electronic invoicing simple, cost-efficient and immediately available without upfront investments or process changes. Maventa offers all the benefits of high-end e-invoicing platforms purely on transaction based pricing without any fixed costs or minimum term periods. Besides the superior technology, Maventa’s intra-network transactions are completely free of charge – which has further pushed forward Maventa’s viral growth.

Gartner’s 2010 Cool Vendors in Multienterprise B2B, listing focuses on “as the notion that electronic transactions enable efficiency and save money becomes widespread, and B2B projects proliferate, some nascent vendors are offering interesting, low-cost-of-entry opportunities, especially for small and midsize businesses, for reducing the costs of electronic trading”

“We are delighted by Gartner’s recognition as a ‘Cool Vendor’ and view it as an important validation of Maventa’s position as a leading electronic invoicing platform,” said Kim Forsman, founder and CEO of Maventa. “Our customer growth rate of 40% month-on-month along with the fact that 97% of our customers are new to electronic invoicing demonstrates that not only have we created truly innovative technology, but something that is impacting how the electronic invoicing market shapes in 13 countries where we have customers”.

Maventa’s technology is instantly available and can be adopted within a company in a matter of minutes from the implementation decision, instead of typical electronic invoicing implementation projects, which may drag on for months. The key to our fast deployment is that the customer doesn’t need to change any of their processes or systems in order to deliver or receive electronic invoices. Maventa is offering its services daily to customers in over 13 different countries, including UK, India, Poland, Germany, Sweden, Turkey, The Netherlands, Italy and Spain among others.

For more information about Maventa, please visit maventa.com.

About Gartner's Cool Vendors Selection Process

Gartner's listing does not constitute an exhaustive list of vendors in any given technology area, but rather is designed to highlight interesting, new and innovative vendors, products and services. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness of a particular purpose.

Gartner defines a cool vendor as a company that offers technologies or solutions that are: Innovative, enable users to do things they couldn't do before; Impactful, have, or will have, business impact (not just technology for the sake of technology); Intriguing, have caught Gartner's interest or curiosity in approximately the past six months.

1 - Gartner Cool Vendors in Multienterprise B2B, 2010, by Paolo Malinverno Benoit J. Lheureux on 12 April 2010.

About Maventa

Maventa is an innovative provider of electronic invoice services. Its award winning software-as-a-service solution makes electronic invoicing simple, cost-efficient and immediately available without upfront investments or process changes. Maventa was founded in 2007 and is one of the fastest growing providers of e-invoice services with +3000 customers in 13 countries. Maventa has offices in Helsinki, Tallinn and Amersfoort. www.maventa.com

Nokia and NSN set the deadline for paper invoices

Tuija LompolojÃ€rvi — Tue, 01 Jun 2010 19:10:28 GMT

Nokia and Nokia Siemens Networks will only accept e-invoices starting from 1 July 2010!

See the list of progressive organisations here:
http://realtimeeconomy.net/wiki/show/1/Progressive_organisations

E-Invoicing in Europe 2010

Tuija LompolojÃ€rvi — Thu, 27 May 2010 17:42:01 GMT

Innopay has published a market guide on e-invoicing 2010. Its objective is to provide readers with a description of the market landscape and recent developments in e-invoicing in Europe.

Download a free copy here: http://www.innopay.com/index.php/plain/ezfileshop/registration/1120/7751/4

Kauniainen and Oulu say NO to paper invoices

Tuija LompolojÃ€rvi — Wed, 26 May 2010 08:58:31 GMT

The list of organisations saying NO to paper invoices is growing rapidly.

City of Kauniainen will accept paper invoices until 1 October 2010. In Oulu paper invoices are accepted until 1 January 2011. After these dates both cities will only handle e-invoices.

Who will be next?

Four-corner model and interoperability critical success factors for electronic invoicing

Esko Penttinen — Mon, 10 May 2010 05:47:26 GMT

Electronic invoicing is typically an innovation that enjoys important positive network effects. The more companies we get into the electronic invoicing network, the more valuable is the technology for the nodes in the network. Just like telephone network, fax network, facebook etc. Metcalfe's law states that the value of such a network is proportional to the square of the number of connected users of the system (n²). I see that the only way to guarantee the participation of most companies to the network is the four-corner model, and efficient and effective interoperability between the operators. This is not the case in the US where it seems that the three-corner model is dominant (along with EDI practices) and network-based electronic invoicing almost non-existing.

Open vacancy: RTE Project Coordinator (in Finnish)

Tuija LompolojÃ€rvi — Tue, 04 May 2010 05:35:33 GMT

Haluatko tulla mukaan kehittämään uusia reaaliaikaisen talouden innovaatioita?

Taloushallinnon työt monipuolistuvat ja luovat mielenkiintoisempia töitä, kun rutiinityöt vaihtuvat laajempien kokonaisuuksien hallintaan. Yritysten taloushallintoon kuuluu kuitenkin edelleen paljon turhaa manuaalisesti tehtävää työtä, joka voitaisiin tulevaisuudessa hoitaa automatisoidummin ja reaaliajassa oikeiden välineiden ollessa käytössä.

Dimes, Tieto ja Aalto-yliopiston kauppakorkeakoulu käynnistivät Real-Time Economy (RTE) –ohjelman vuonna 2006. Ohjelman tarkoituksena on edistää taloushallinnon prosessien ja palveluiden sähköistämistä ja reaaliaikaistamista yhteistyössä laajan sidosryhmäverkoston kanssa. Tavoitteena on myös saada aikaan yleisesti hyväksyttyjä käytäntöjä ja toimintatapoja alalle sekä kouluttaa tulevaisuuden osaajia.

Real-Time Economy –ohjelma hakee

PROJEKTIKOORDINAATTORIA

jonka tehtävänä on hallinnoida RTE-ohjelmaa ja viedä sitä eteenpäin yhdessä innostavan projektitiimin kanssa. Projektikoordinaattorilla on keskeinen rooli RTE-verkoston ylläpitämisessä ja ohjelmalle asetettujen tavoitteiden saavuttamisessa. Tärkeimpinä tehtävinä ovat yhteydenpito eri sidosryhmiin, projektinhallinta ja raportointi Tekesille, viestintä sekä RTE Community –verkkoyhteisön tukeminen.

Odotamme sinulta
- innostunutta asennetta ja kykyä katsoa tulevaisuuteen
- kiinnostusta digitaaliseen talouteen, verkkoyhteisöihin ja uusiin teknologioihin
- oma-aloitteisuutta, organisointikykyä ja kokemusta projektityöskentelystä
- viestinnällistä otetta ja hyviä vuorovaikutus- ja yhteistyötaitoja (suomi ja englanti)
- soveltuvaa yliopisto-/korkeakoulututkintoa

Työsuhde on kokopäiväinen ja määräaikainen alkaen 2.8.2010 ja päättyen 31.7.2011. Työsuhteen jatko on mahdollinen ohjelman rahoituksesta riippuen.

Lähetä vapaamuotoinen hakemus ja ansioluettelo palkkatoivomuksineen 18.5.2010 mennessä osoitteeseen ext.tuija.lompolojarvi@tieto.com.

Lisätietoa tehtävästä:
Tuija Lompolojärvi
ext.tuija.lompolojarvi@tieto.com
P. 044-051 8689

www.realtimeeconomy.net
www.dimes.fi

Follow conference Electronic Invoicing in Europe via web stream

Tuija LompolojÃ€rvi — Tue, 27 Apr 2010 10:46:02 GMT

The European Commission organises a conference on Electronic invoicing in Europe on 27-28 April 2010 in Madrid. You can follow the conference via web stream: http://www.mityc.es/canalmityc/directo.aspx

The conference programme can be found here: http://ec.europa.eu/enterprise/newsroom/cf/document.cfm?action=display&doc_id=5748&userservice_id=1&request.id=0

Deadlines for paper invoices

Tuija LompolojÃ€rvi — Thu, 08 Apr 2010 05:27:58 GMT

Declining to accept paper and PDF invoices is already a reality in the Nordic countries. Many more corporations, municipalities and other organisations are starting to refuse paper invoices as e-invoicing provides a more efficient alternative.

See the current list here:

Companies	Public sector	Others
Nordea, Autumn 2006	Denmark, 1.2.2005	Aalto University, 1.1.2010
Lindström, 08/2008	Singapore, 1.5.2008	Federation of Finnish Financial Services, 1.1.2010
OpusCapita, 31.3.2009	Sweden, 1.7.2008	Tampere Chamber, 31.12.2010
Aditro, 1.5.2009	Italy, 1.7.2008
Tieto, 1.6.2009	Finland, 1.1.2010
UPM, 1.7.2009	Spain, 1.11.2009
Rautaruukki, 1.8.2009	City of Tampere, 1.1.2007
Kesko, 1.10.2009	City of Helsinki, 30.9.2009
Ahlstrom, 16.10.2009	City of Espoo, 30.6.2010
Kone, 1.1.2010	Götene Municipality, 1.1.2010
Elisa, 30.4.2010	City of Borås, 1.1.2010
Basware, 1.5.2010	Landstinget Blekinge, 1.4.2010
Deloitte, 1.6.2010	City of Jönköping, Spring 2010
PwC, 31.12.2010	City of Turku, 1.6.2010
	Bank of Finland, 1.7.2010
	City of Kauniainen, 1.10.2010
	City of Oulu, 1.1.2011

E-invoicing aspects from Finland.

Kim Forsman — Fri, 26 Mar 2010 15:22:12 GMT

The discussion about e-invoicing is beating around the bush, at least when it comes to banks involved in the process of exchanging data. Having had the pleasure of working some of the forerunners in electronic invoicing (both banks and operators) I wish to elaborate on the flipside as well, by releasing this note about the status of electronic invoicing in Finland. The opinions stated within are solely my personal and has nothing to do with any entity I might represent. I aim to be as objective as possible, but please, take it with a grain of salt. Although, this might be something to take into account when quoting Finland as the spearhead of e-invoicing.

Banks in Finland seem very disinclined to cooperate with other service providers; in order to enable SMEs to send electronic invoices. I base this fact on discussions with Nordea Bank, OP-Pohjola Group and Sampo Pankki (subsidiary of Danske Bank) – three of the dominating banks in Finland. These banks already have the capabilities of delivering and receiving e-invoices on behalf of their users and have provided services for years to the SME-market. These three banks combined have a 52% market-share of all e-invoicing accounts in Finland.

As our company provides services for this same market-segment as the banks, we’ve faced a resistance since the discussions were started in early 2008. A basis for a coherent and functional network is that all the established service providers are allowed to exchange information with each other –otherwise it isn’t functioning. The inevitable fact is that by causing mischief in network operations and forcing their customers in a closed banking network will lead the banks to grind to a complete halt. The explanation is found from the negative networking effect that occurs from provider complacency. The absence of viable competitors can cause a provider to restrict resources, consider fee increases, or otherwise create an environment contrary to the users’ benefit. This effect is currently spreading like wildfire in the customer-base of bank-driven electronic invoicing. Let’s inspect why this implosion occurs.

The banks exchange electronic invoices between other banks. Each company has a banking account – right? The key-idea from the banks perspective is to use that massive channel to secure a new market. Ingenious idea – if the service offered meets up with the market demand. Sad enough, it doesn’t.

Based on the negotiations we’ve had with the aforementioned banks, the counterparts are reluctant to open interconnectivity between their clients and ours. What good does an e-invoicing network do, when customers on the networks can’t reach each other? Maventa has pursued to establish interconnectivities with all banks and only the three remaining ones withstand. These banks have been kind enough to propose that our clients are more than welcome to send invoices to their banking network if they make a separate agreement with the corresponding bank and each transaction would cost an unjustifiable 0.80 – 0.45 Euros extra to them (Maventa charges its customers 0.25 – 0.05 Euros / invoice). In my humble opinion, come again? Our customers and we would pay the bank in order to send invoices to their network, which the bank would further charge from their customers. “A double whammy” in street lingo. No wonder that this bank network hasn’t been exactly the hit of the century, as seen in the next paragraph. This can be deemed as extremely protective conduct from the banks' perspective. They would open connections if we pay them, but not interconnectivity – what are they afraid of?

By inspecting the market anatomy in Finland it’s obvious that the bank provided electronic invoicing services have never met the demand that large enterprises require. Most of the large enterprises use a hub-provider to consolidate their accounts payables and accounts receivables. The hub-provider converts the received invoices to an in-house format, which is then delivered for automated processing. The Finnish market consists of around 500 million invoices exchanged per year and of these the banks delivered a contemptibly small share of 5,7 million (1.14%) in 2008. Now – if e-invoicing was nearly as mature and easy to adopt as the talks around the town and based on articles in newspapers – this key metric would be substantially higher, probably in the ranges of 35-65% by now. The market share of the banks measured in B2B accounts is notable, contrary uptake of services is extremely low. To put the actual traction in to proportion, the aggregated amount of uptake by the banks barely covers one invoice delivered per capita per year (5.6 million inhabitants in Finland). Even in the light of these factual figures, the banks seem to be pleased with the progress they make.

The users of the services don’t seem as happy. We are contacted weekly by unhappy bank e-invoicers looking to change to a working solution. The large enterprises require attachments of various types alongside their electronic invoices, which the banks are unable to provide transmission for. The second problem arises when the banks insist on trafficking their own format, Finvoice (more about this charade in a minute), which is quite crippled when it comes to B2B invoicing. Finvoice is designed as a lightweight debit-note and lacks the ability to contain an invoice image (usually PDF) for human convenience. Businesses using Finvoice are displeased with the horrible invoice design and lack of ability to incorporate a company logo on the invoice representation and lack of required data-fields. The invoice is a marketing message for businesses and most companies have used time, money and effort on designing their invoices. Who in the banking consortium thought that the businesses wanted to go back to the cave-era with electronic invoicing? These shortcomings alone give the decision-makers full right to cancel their subscriptions and ditch the bank e-invoicing.

The Finnish Federation of Financial Services is the maintainer and the founder for the electronic invoicing format called Finvoice. Some of the banking problematic boils down to this very format and the way it has been adopted. The format itself has design-flaws; for example the documentation insists on having two root-nodes in the XML-document – hence it shouldn’t be called XML. XML Specification stipulate clearly “There is exactly one element, called the root…”. The organization that developed the Finvoice format was clearly incompetent to follow the XML Specifications from W3C from the get-go. The design flaws apart, the banks do not currently use XML-schemas to validate the contents of the invoice. This is a neglect that any self-respecting system developer would have tackled years ago. DTDs (Document Type Definition) use a terse formal syntax that declares precisely which elements and references may appear where in the document of the particular type, and what the elements’ contents and attributes are. DTDs also declare entities, which may be used in the instance document whereas XSD (XML Schema Document) can be used to express a set of rules to which an XML document must conform in order to be considered 'valid' according to that schema. By neglecting the second part (XSD schema validation) the banks are happily shuffling around “dirty data” that can lead to severe security threats. Even if the banking network is closed, the parties (businesses and consumers) are prone to malware that can be included in the non-validated documents. A part from security threats the implications from trying to process an invalid XML-document usually leads to frustrated end-users going head-to-head with each other – even if the culprit sits somewhere in between.

An interesting revelation to back up the discussion is, that banks themselves use operators as providers to traffic their electronic invoices. Sampo Finance (Sampo Rahoitus) and Pohjola Pankki Oyj (Pohjola Bank Plc) uses Basware as one of their invoicing providers, Nordea Finance Finland Oy (Nordea Rahoitus Suomi Oy) uses Itella? This is quite a mixed message, the banks themselves don’t believe in their services and have decided to use operators instead. Why should the SMEs be imposed to use the bank network with some of the flaws we’ve just inspected.

To my best belief the banks have already identified the increasing churn and are aggressively looking for means to plug the leaks. This all boils down to the negative networking effect that will lead to a crumbling collapse of the banks e-invoicing services within the next three to five years, if countermeasures are neglected. Ten years ago a stealth-mode coup like this might have gone unnoticed – today the service users are voting with their feet. If the service is not living up to the customers’ expectations, the world will find out. Try hitting Google to find out what SMEs think about Finvoice and Banks. One viable option for a bank to survive the digitalization turmoil, I assume, is to partner up with the established service providers without safeguarding their own network and hiding behind their mumbo-jumbo about “bank secrecy”. It’s either coexistence or crash and fall – either way, looking forward to it.