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Basware invoice processing for Quality Assurance

foreign [Music] webinar in partnership with bazware my name is Peter dorrington and I'm going to be the host for this webinar which is about how to fuel your procure to pay processes with um high quality e-invoice data so um I'm delighted to be joined today by two expert speakers firstly we have Gustav from baswell hello we have Francois from flexim hello hi everyone hi now Gustav from Francois will introduce themselves properly in just a moment but before they do I would just like to go over a little bit of housekeeping so firstly this is a webinar so you don't need to worry about your camera being on or muting your microphone but if you're with the live webinar we'd love to hear from you so if you have questions or observations then please do enter them into the comments section I'll be keeping an eye on those and we will try to answer as many of them as we can towards the end now our agenda today is in a few very simple portions in a moment um Gustav is going to set the scene for us we have a few slides for that don't worry it's not Death by PowerPoint it literally is just a few slides and then we're going to spend the bulk of our time in a conversation where we're sharing our experiences and discussing some of the important topics around this theme of improving p2b with e-invoicing before we come to a final Q and A and then just a few seconds before the end I'll do the briefest of summaries and talk about what's going to happen next so then without further Ado I'd like to hand over to Gustav so Gustav if you wouldn't mind um I'd love for you to set the scene for us about why this is such an important topic to be talking about today thank you Peter and thank you for the introduction um today I'll be talking about data in your in your system in your ABS system and also touching upon compliance um me talking about good stuff I work within our presets organization where I speak to customers about this exactly those topics so I talked to our customers about how they can improve the data what do they have to do to be confined and so on and with me I have our parking representative Francois if you want to say hello as well yes Francois so I'm working with friction flexim is the system integrator it's a long time busway partner so we are working together to implement uh electronic invoicing solution and invoice processing solution and at flexim I am working as a consultant specialized in the all the electronic invoicing topics thank you thank you so as I said I'll talk about data and I'll talk about compliance and when I am not speak to customers about this I notice a very big gap or not Gap rather different levels on how far you come in your process with this and to gauge a little bit on where we are here um I will include some poll questions so first I'll talk about how to automate what is a statement on what do you need how to get your data into AP process and then I'll talk about how it works best customers work with their data and then touch on confines but the case where we are right now we do have a poll for you uh Peter if you want to run that great thank you very much so we're going to do our first poll um and the question is this are you using data for improving your accounts payable processes today so the answers are yes fully yes to some extent no but we want to no there's no need or something else now if it's something else please put that in the comments so the poll is now live we're going to let that run for a few seconds whilst we do um then Gustav let me just um ask a quick question um about your impressions we're obviously going to talk about things like um Automation and transformation but I think a lot of organizations have been looking at transformation but they haven't really seen it as an opportunity to make some fundamental change so they may speed up an existing process but they haven't really had an opportunity to change and I was just wondering whether that's what you're seeing that people have thought that P2P transmission is simply me making it fast when of course it I believe it should be more than that and here there's a very big difference among customers to speak to in terms of their maturity when it comes to this some are some have come a far somewhere in the beginning process and some haven't really considered the topics to bring up yet um and that's a big shift from a few years ago where where even fewer had even begun that transmission or even reached the targets yeah thank you and I think this is one of the things that I I'm not frustrated that's too strong a word but it's you know something I think has been up for a mind anyway let's give the results now um well this is quite interesting so good stuff I'm hoping this is either reflecting what you expected or maybe the cause for conversation so then answers to that question about are you using data for improving your account's payable processes are these so yes fully 11 so about a tenth yes to some extent almost half at 48 no but we want to is a third so it's 33 percent no there's no need zero and we've had a couple of people answer with seven percent other now what I think is very interesting here is um there are either embarking on that process or they want to which I suspect is pretty much what you were expecting to start I'm very happy to see that this zero percent don't know there's no need on the answers here I mean when you look at the answers here data in AP processes that used to be what you had available like reports in your system your own Excel compilation so whatever data you could gather and then you would improve your MP AP process is based on on your own experience your gut feeling and clues you get from that data but now when you have the possibility to get full data you can get a full data import with all the invoice data you can get a full data export of all the data generated within your system so all your AP actions happening with APA processes then Improvement can come not only from experience and gut feeling but also from actual evidence that you can see from the data so I'm happy to see I'm happy with these results here especially you know when there's there's nobody else saying no to this one and then moving on I'll talk a little bit on on the importance of data and your ones what I call step one here what you have here is of course developing your after saving money and in this context we talk about automation used for saving money because manual processes they cost they cost money they cost time and they cost a friction for development you know you really get stuck with the manual processes and difficult to to move forward and so you can automate them and that can happen in two ways you can do a static automation where you set up very predefined rules such as if the PO number starts with a 9 and the supply is Acme then assign Dimension y the other way to automate is a more Dynamic one and that's more should we say the the future one where you're not using any kind of predefined rules but rather organically developed rules where the computer and AIG engine will give you suggestions saying hey we noticed that 95 percent of the invoices with a p or number starts with a line and the supplies Acme well they were assigned to Dimension y so instead of such a such a rule going forward and for this to be able to happen you need machine learning and the Machine learning can only work with good data so this then comes back to the the having good data as a step one I can put it into a cycle even a a flywheel cycle like this where if I start from the top left here your your goal is to increase your business that's what you want to do you want to grow you want to get better and in order to do so you need to optimize your processes you need to see all the laggers are what we can do better and so on and to be able to optimize well then you need a visibility you need to be able to work with and learn from all the data points and that is both the income and data as mentioned earlier so the data you get from the suppliers as well as the general data so whatever happens within your AP workflow so to be able to have the visibility you needed data and this is the step one once you have the data well we can then go back either one once they're further to increase business because the momentum builds up here the more and more you get and so once you increase business you have more data and then you can get more visibility in your optimize and get better business increase business and so on so the kind of insight you might be looking at within APS for example why invoices are failing which invoices are getting in stock and where are they getting stuck in the process you want to prevent overpayment and then compare what was paid with what should have been paid you want to optimize invoice timing you know you know your suppliers and optimized to pay at the right moment to those suppliers now that even better like getting automated suggestions so using AI to suggest how to handle invoices for example code interventions and so on or to find Anonymous like fraud detection and and other big errors and going either once they're further to have a predictive analysis where you got forecast of what invoices will probably get stuck in a system um where will you have a big workload so this is why you need the data to be able to to get those kind of insights and go and then I'm saying you know saying that most people have been looking at improving data repeatedly you want to ask this question as well yes thank you very much Gustav this is a slightly longer question so um it's this what is hindering you or what's stopping you from improving your data quality is it one internal processes or resistance two unwilling suppliers three costs or resources for the knowledge that in order to do bullet the strategy or sorry systems is question five other for six well seven we've already got the full data quality solution so the polls live let's take a few seconds to do that and whilst we do that let me just again talk to Gustav about this because you've mentioned data so many times and you're absolutely right if you're in business today you're in the business of data it's pretty much impossible to run any modern business without having data it enables all our processes but the thing I thought that was particularly powerful is when you talked about insights and optimization because one of the things I hear so many companies saying is we've got lots of data but precious little insight and if we don't have Insight how could we possibly Choose Or navigate to the best possible future so I'd just like to get your thoughts on that about this Evolution isn't it there's well the data just tells us what happened insights might tell us why it happened but obviously what we're aiming for is the optimal Insight that tells us what's the best that could happen and there's also a shift here because if you look at data and how you would analyze the data it used to be that you look at the data and you try to improve based on the data they take one step further and you're able to have with more data get analysis where you're able to see dig more deeper into data and see for example bottlenecks and so on and if you go one step further then you have more of an Insight where you get also predictions and and advice from the data so it's really taking it going from those Excel tables onto like full for should we say assisted insights that you can work with yeah thanks good stuff because you're right I mean it's one thing to draw a trend line that's relatively straightforward but of course what we all want to do particularly in a world which is a very volatile and chaotic is really just understand yeah well what could I do to influence that so maybe I don't want that Trend to do that anyway let's have a look at the results then um so then um in answer to the question what's hindering you from improving your data quality um top answer internal processes or resistance with 38 percent um followed by unwilling suppliers I think we're going to talk about that one that's about 15 percent cost or resources about a quarter on 22 knowledge about 11 the systems also about 11 and other um 3.7 so it seems like the top answer is internal processes and resistance but we have two other answers that did quite well we've got the cost and resources but another question we'll come to in a moment is unwilling suppliers because of course they need to be part of the solution as well um uh first I want to say I would be I would feel my hands being tight as well if I had to choose one of these as well this is really a question where you would want to ask multiple different ones all of the above but hopefully not but um with internal processes then resistance being the highest that is something I don't as well when I talk to customers and it's not so much of of uh well it can be to some extent where people say this is the way it has always been done and this works no need to change it it's more of the complicated processes in my experience that are difficult to change where you really need to work with change management and I think Nicola will with effort sorry Francois will agree with me that's you know it's one thing to implement the whole a good and great AP system and it's a whole other thing to give it benefits of it and so we work a lot with change management uh unwilling suppliers is very region dependent I think in some regions it is the suppliers who are driving the change in other ones it's it's the opposite and suppliers can be lazy you know they will may not include all the data that they should or could on the documents or they might put them in wrong format or wrong fields and so on to make it difficult and then of course cost resources uh being a third oh sorry as a second here change management takes time and money it's it's a big investment to to change big processes of course looking at our customers the ones who do best the ones we call our Trailblazers so first of all we invest heavily in data we do that to analyze usage and develop our product we use data to improve machine learning across our customers so that means we take if we have a supplier sending invoices to One customer then we learn what from the invoices that supplier is sending not only to you our customer but the invoices that Supply is selling to our other customers as well um you can also use data to help our customers Benchmark to see where they are and where they could be and so our Traders customers are the ones who have Implement implemented this step one having the great data and what they do is they have a highly automated accounts payable process either when human touch is needed anymore it's more of of confirming or monitoring and actually working on the invoice and they process electronic invoices straight through strength means the invoice goes through a basically automatic monitored flow and that's really nice when you get this happening they managed to capture early payment discounts and this goes back to the time with the invoices knowing when is the money better would you supplier because my discount and when is the money better in your own account to accumulate the interest they provide suppliers with self-service and real-time visibility so this means that your suppliers do not have to call you email you asking what is the status of the invoice how do you receive this invoice and so on I'll draw that they can see this in an automated way online foreign X and processing an invoice of course does not mean until it's paid but when it's ready it should be paid um I mentioned earlier that data is two part again the data that is imported that's invoices mainly and the inward data decision is generated when you work in the system and talk a bit more than on on the important parts when you import data and moving over a little bit more towards the compliance part here which is another very hot topic today and going forward um as I said I speak a lot to our customers and the terms we use mean different things for different people so I just wanted to make sure we're all on the same page and invoice very simply can't be translated in three different ways through three methods we have a paper invoice we have a PDF invoice and we have an e invoice a paper was this one you know where you print it on paper you put in an envelope and you ship it over or you hand it off at the reception on a buyer a pdfp was is either one that has been created on a computer so you know you print it from word or your air system or it might be one that has been scanned that scan paper invoice basically and then e invoice is a data document a data file that is sent from the supplier to the buyer it's not meant to be be viewed in its original form by humans but rather we you need to create some kind of visualization of the evils and my main takeaway from this slide is that invoices are not the same as previous invoices an invoice may contain a PDF but it's not the same so when I talk about invoices I'm not talking about sending PDFs over email or so on and what you want to do what you supplies want to do and we'll label them what to do is to move away from paper to PDF or from PDF to emojc because it has a lower cost for everybody it is faster and it's the most secure the best data you can get also to set the stage a little bit with compliance so to make sure we are all on the same page against something I noticed when I talk to customers on on how much you know about this but there's a big shift going on in how invoices are transferred the compliance models I'm going to show two more slides to go into a bit more detail on these but what's causing this shift is that many countries have noticed a vat Gap so there's a gap between the vat being reported to the tax authorities and the vat actually printed on the invoice and cut this they want to close this guy and should use do this by implementing various control methods on how invoices may be transferred the post audit model and there's a clearance model the post on the model is what we have in I'm basic thing I want to have in Finland in northern Europe in North America and so on and it's a pretty simple one the supply gets the order sends the invoice that's how it says the goods and then sends the invoice and then afterwards both parties the supplier and they buy the report to tax authorities so here the supply will receive the order they will send the goods but the invoice can no longer be sent straight on to the buyer but it must go through tax authorities oil must get a stem from tax authorities or many other models this is a very fragmented setup on how it's done so this means there are responsibilities for the supplier there might be responsibilities for the buyer or they might be responsibilities for both already when the invoice is transferred this is the model we see in southern Europe Italy being a very prominent example all South America more or less and many countries in Asia there are more and more countries moving in this direction especially For Us in Europe of interest is Poland France and I will not go into detail about what's happening in those countries after the safe Subway basic information Poland will start 2024 with their clearance model the main requirements on the supplier how the invoice can be transmitted and what Fields must be present on the invoice there are things that might need to be done by the buyer as well such they can collect the invoices from the exchange portal kscf but it mostly it's mostly it's for the sender supplier to take action here France on the other hand will require actions by both the buyer and the supplier they have a staggered introduction starting 2024 with the biggest largest company going first and then the media size companies and funded the smallest companies and in France only invoices will be affected as accepted once this comes into force and there are as I said actions required by both the supply and buyer if you want to keep up with this then I do recommend the password compliance map this is available at the link here by sort of called slash compliance map here we list the requirements for each and every country um promise that we have all kinds available because there are so many but for the major markets they are available there but um back to you Peter lovely thank you very much Gustav and again as you were speaking there are a couple of things that really went through my mind um so um the first of which was you know transformation isn't just us clearly government is going through transformation as well and I can understand why they want to close the VAP Gap because we're going through an economic recession pretty much everywhere right now and government has always been very keen on collecting the money that it's owed although it hasn't always been very good at doing it the second of which is that as a byproduct of doing this the data becomes much more readily available and not only will it support more straight through processing which is normally a good thing because it's um a resource cost which means you can free up people to do things that actually add value to the business but we do get those opportunities to look at well where can we optimize you mentioned for example working with suppliers getting those discounts for early payment but that's one of the indirect things as well managing A supplier base where their health and well-being is as important to your future as making sure your own team and employees are anyway um what we're going to do now for the next few minutes is we're going to have a bit of a conversation now I have got some topics of conversation that I would like to explore with Gustav and Francois but please if there's anything that anybody watching the live broadcast would like to add pop it into the comments um and we'll see if we can get it in so the first question Gustav I'm going to come back to you as a result of some of the things you were saying is um you've I think alluded to it but I'd like to get a little bit more detail in this is why is e-invoicing by that server to server uh relationship key to successful and future P2P operations foreign imagine your colleague is inviting you to a calendar event two events you know at work and you want to have it in your calendar now would you have your colleagues sent over the the event invites via paper and you then type it into your calendar would you have them brought it send it as a PDF by email and you can copy paste it into the calendar or would you prefer to have as an automatic email that goes straight into your calendar and I hope the answer here is the last option you you like to have it go straight into your calendar that's an automatic integration and that is what EA voicing can do invoices mean there's no there's no need to transform invoice it can go straight into your AP system where the data needs to be this is also kind of a preparation for the future because the data needs to be there and this is a a whole topic for all AP departments all around the world so your competitors are doing the same thing as you need to do now they will want to move from paper to PDF to E paper will always be a subpar in terms of getting the data into the system because you would always have to have either a camera trying to read the data or you would also have to have somebody who keys in the data or a combination of the two PDFs take yourself from the same as above because a PDF that is basically a scan of a paper will have to have some kind of camera recognition there as well and if you have a good PDF system well then that PDF system can go into the file itself and grab the data from it without using any kind of camera technology but they'll have ear voices and they are pure data they are really nice um and I think when I look at the audience list before this meeting I think they are well known here and with the benefits um you know for something to grow with an invoice the input needs to be wrong the supply will have to have make a mistake and then you should have a good AP system to cover that mistakes but there won't be any problem problems with the data coming in another big benefit of ear voices is their language independent it doesn't matter if you receive an invoice in in Greek or in Swedish you know the data will still come in right and they're really fast you know takes only seconds and minutes to transfer then they have the lowest cost and then we have the compliance benefits as well because many of those countries who or most actually who move into these clearance model where you need to involve tax authorities already during transfer they also say that invoice must be an a voice they no longer will accept recycled paper invoices um and you don't need to well again with the data it's all there you don't need to worry what is header level what's role level it will all come into your system right um so for any voice thing I mean the questions you probably asking yourself in APR how many invoices were automatically matched um how many how many exceptions are we having how much spend is committed by a payment plans or so on and how many investors were paid on time and to work with those those questions one of the key questions is well what is our e-invoice rates so that I'd say would be a long answer to your question no thank you good stuff there's lots of things there that I'm at Value and I just want to unpack one or two of them one thing that for me as a supplier is really important is that ability to track where's my payment where's my invoice being processed I suspect that many departments that handle this is actually a bulk of their interactions with suppliers people chasing invoices and payments trying to work out well where am I because I submitted it and it's gone into some black hole and I just hope that I get paid on time the other thing as you said is that where that isn't the case or where it might be a course is where there's been um a miskey you know some data is wrong there's something with the invoice that is impossible to match and so we have all of those exceptional cases but once you start dealing with raw data you don't get the translation errors which I think you can get when you're looking at First Look paper even PDF isn't entirely devoid of it so anything you can do that can remove the amount of effort in processing those exceptional cases or removes a cause for having to do it in the first place is really important which brings me to my second question because um this is something as I just mentioned we all have to deal with so how do we ensure that we're getting high quality data off our invoices because that's absolutely fundamental to um a new approach to P2P isn't it I mean as you've um did say a little earlier if you put garbage data in then it's really going to impact the process and we end up with more of our invoices being having to be manually processed or treated as exceptions rather than straight through so what can we do to make sure that we are capturing high quality data off our invoices um and that's a good question um so coming back to the three English channels I mentioned so for paper you would you you need to do camera you need to do OCR you cannot get away from it um and then what you can do with two to to improve the OCR quality is to have some kind of manual validation with somebody checks that the eyes and I another one or an l and so on for PDF sometimes you will have to do OCR when it's a scanned image then that's the only thing you can do but when it's a data PDF one has been computer generated one way you can basically copy paste data from within it then skip those your and you know have a system that goes into the PDI PDF extracts the data instead because then a one would always be a one and nothing else and with PDS there are also many hybrid performance coming where there's both an image and data in the same file and that's a development that we started a few years back that is growing and then when it comes to invoices um well conversions should be automatic you know and even what should be sent to you and you just arise in your ab system the one thing that is still a bit of a topic here is that you may need to onboard your suppliers when you get an invoice address to be able to receive the invoices you need to tell your suppliers hey this is my invoice address I will now be able to receive invoices through bestware or support operator please send it first it's a bit of a supply on volume there and let us also Regional differences um I mentioned northern Europe earlier so here in Norris you will be getting invoice rates of of 80 or higher if you work well with your suppliers but if you take a step South and go tomorrow to Europe with with Germany PDF is a lot more um a lot more common already in North America USA invoice is is that the capability is there but it's pretty much non-existent when I talk to my my American customers and I you know it's PDF that's the thing that they want and there's also a lack of status there there are some countries that are surprising and that is Italy for example in South America where you will be able to get invoice rates that are close to 100 and that's because of the local legal mandates that are there so the supplies will have to send invoices Africa is mostly paper some kind of slow PDF and Asia is is very mixed between different countries what what is there but again to to help ensure it gets core the data is you need to work with the suppliers to move from paper to PDF toe and that's either a campaign you run your own or you you lost the help of somebody like like us or our partners to you know analyze a supply base which ones can we target which ones can we get over to invoice can thereby capture a big chunks that would be my answer Peter lovely thank you very much Gustavo I think um we might touch back on that in a moment you know why how we engage suppliers but before we do we've had one question which I'd like to quickly put to you good stuff and then I'll give you a moment's rest and I'll go to Francois but the question was this uh it's from Tanya who asks are e-invoices Erp agnostic so I suspect the answer will be about standards uh well the short answer is yes uh so the short answer to that if they're right now it's like yes they are so an invoice is a data file where it says the supply name is this the new number is this and so on and it's just a matter of importing that data into your Erp or AP system so when you receive an invoice it's just a matter of [Music] of agreeing together with your operator What data should be in should we should we place where for it to be important to Erp so yes emojis can be used with all erps and AP invoices great thank you very much good stuff as you say the data itself is agnostic a name is a name is a name there may be some interesting wrinkles about things like format but we can thrash that out in the standards so I'm going to go to Francois now and Francois I'd like to bring you in this conversation um and really I want to talk about an example so let's talk about well the question is this the issue is this how do we remain compliant with global mandates such as the upcoming um France 2024 e invoicing mandate now I don't want to focus too much on that but it's a good example of the way that many governments are going so how do we remain compliant with global mandates such as that in France yeah that that's a that's a really big challenge because obviously you would understand that every country has its own view of the Mandate and that's the first very important topic and uh no one obviously no one want to do exactly as the other one has done so that's the first Challenge and so you will have as much as model as you have country so yes we said that we have this clearance model in in a y you know like it's done in Italy and like it will be done in France so that's the same kind of model but the format all the way the data is going to be exchanged will be completely different okay and that's why it is very important to rely on global you know Global operator that can manage if you have that kind of challenge to uh deal with invoices from everyone almost everywhere in the world you will need a global operator that has that has the ability to manage those different format those different regulations that's where I will make the link to the the compliance map that has been explained by Gustav but this is very important if you look at that compliance mat and click on several countries you will see that no country has the same answer or the other so this is the main challenge so first of all obviously you have to scope you have to to make a scoping of your what you want to do you have to set the scene of what's going to be your project where are my suppliers and obviously when we are talking about compliance where are my client clients where are my customers because it's that it's it's a two-way it's a two-way process you know I have to manage the supplier invoices and they have to manage the the invoices that I'm gonna listen to my customers okay and as we said earlier here the the main challenge will be most of the time on the sending side you know because this is where you create the information when you receive the information you receive the information from your supplier you are not creating you are interpreting the information you are putting it in your systems the best way you can but when you are the the supplier and you are creating the invoice for for use for your customers you are creating the information and that's where you you you need to be sure that you're gonna first follow the expected regulation and then do the the the the thing in the right way to avoid any uh any discrepancies in in the future and any exception in at your when your customer is going to process the foreign will Implement their own model on how clearance should work and it's a lot of work for for the AP people instead of work for the AR people and it's a lot of work for us operators here but there's a benefit to it and that is to you know usually the invoice method comes with it where it says you have to send invoices which is a benefit then you'll be able to get the invoice rate high yeah thanks very much Francois Gustav I'll come back to you in just a moment um Francois but before I do just struck me isn't this the story everywhere government always decides to go that their way is better than everybody else's and they can't agree in one common standard but at least the data um is reliable and standard so yes the processes may be different and the file formats may be different but uh underpinning data is certainly them but good stuff you raised a very good point there not only is this a way of being compliant as business it's actually a very efficient way of being a business so in one ways yes we may not like change being um pushed upon us but it does bring about good within the business it reduces costs it reduces errors it enables us to Foster better relationships with our suppliers and at the end of the day with our customers too because let's not forget they don't care where the problem May lie somewhere in our processing chain all they care is the way that it impacts them the truth also the case of suppliers that they don't care that we might have a problem when our processes what they care about is where's my money so um yeah we have some quite big drivers doing this but um this all sounds very well and good but Francois what I'd like to do is ask you I guess this is going to be a two-part question so the first part is this obviously this is something we're going to have to do um we could accelerate it because it is as we said a good thing to do but we're going to have to do it at some point so could you share any best practices in invoicing that you've seen in the marketplace so you've been involved in lots of implementation have you got any best e-invoicing practices that you could share with us yes so I don't know Gustav if you can show that slide but that would be important to to people to understand that there is there is step to follow to to to together an invoicing project working well first of all we talk a lot since uh 20 or more minutes about invoice data but you have to talk about supplier data so you need you need to have clean supplier information you need you need to make sure that your supplier data as a good quality because even if you got electronic invoices with everything properly set up no interpretation no CR no manual gain everything is going to be electronic if you got the the information from your invoice and you don't have the relevant supplier data it's it's going to be useless okay because you have to link the invoice information to your suppliers so first of all you will have to focus and ensure that your supplier Master data is um that you also play your master that is up to date and that is you have all the information to manage your supplier properly regarding the invoice process and the main information will be obviously some tax ID information because how are you gonna select the right supplier when an invoice is coming in it's based on supplier fiscal ID you know you will need that information at some point so you will need to maintain some information in your supplier Master data to make sure that when the invoice is coming it's going to be set on the right supplier okay that's that that's something you will have to focus on when you start an invoicing project obviously you we're gonna need a receiving Channel okay so you will need a way this we are talking about electronic information you will need a receiving channel it's like when you when you want when you want to communicate you're going to need a computer you're going to need a phone whatever for the for the invoices you're gonna need a receiving channel that why you will contract with depending on your volumes and depending of the data you want and the the level of exchange you want to do electronically you will have to to to to contract with a network operator so that's where as good as a a network that is a worldwide network but there are several other operators but you will have someone who manage your communication okay because you cannot set up as as a as a customer you cannot set up a point-to-point connection with every of your suppliers you will need you will need a network to manage that and all the the new um you know compliance programs coming from governments are based on the kind of centralized Network that would help you to manage that but at any point you will you will need to connect to to a receiving Channel okay to get that information and then also after that uh when you have those invoice electronic invoice coming in your company okay you can print them but that's not that's not what you want to do you don't want to get everything electronic and then print an invoice to send it to the approval process okay what you want what you will want to you will want an electronic process inside your company to manage the invoice flow okay and that's why you have to review and think about your invoice processing inside your company because it's one thing to get the invoice from the supplier it's one thing to have it with high quality data but then you have to manage it inside your company with the right process and that's very important so that's you have to if you want to go to a what we call a touchless invoice processing you have to focus on this first get an invoice get get a receiving Channel unsure your supplier data is accurate and up to date and have think about your internal process about managing your invoices because you want to add something on this you gave a great answer he's very wisely shaking his head so I think it it is a great Point um and I do like this thing that you were mentioning there Francois you know it isn't just the data we do have to have a process we have to have the ability to do that otherwise it's just improving one step and I said right at the beginning that transformation by definition implies that we change so we have to look at more than just automating or simplifying or streamlining just one part of the process if for no other reason then we miss such a big opportunity in not picking up the others now we've had a couple of questions coming in and an observation so first I wanted to do is uh earlier on Sarah mentioned about our second poll she also thought it was unfair we could only choose one answer from that I think I wholeheartedly agree I doubt that anybody is suffering from all of them but certainly multiple things can apply there we've also had a couple of questions um and I'm going to and they're from another Francois so um so first question is this um and I'll come back to a couple more but keep coming to questions coming in so Francois I guess this is going to be the other France why I asked you how does punch out process could be implemented within bazware so now I must admit this is beyond my area of expertise so if I'm not pronounced that correctly please do let me know but how does a Punch-Out process be implemented Within badswap so so if if we are talking about the the potential being the ability for an organization to access the catalog of another company through a system so that's something that your procurement system should be able to do but that that won't have uh that won't be linked to the uh to the that won't be directly linked to the invoice processing you know invoice processing much benefit will benefit of that because you will have a fully integrated process to place your orders to your suppliers then your supplier can use some kind of Flip Flip order a solution that will flip an order to an invoice and that will enhance the quality of your data but at the end this is I think that would be two separate processes but obviously you can having a punch out system you know meaning using a catalog from supplier won't is relevant with the invoicing process you can use the two systems together so yes but I I would like to have a for a bit more information and maybe we can answer that out of the uh of the for the exact question but for me there is no there is no issue to use a pen shot within with the electronic invases process great thank you very much Francois and I think Roland get drawn into quite long then what I suspect might be a detailed conversation why don't we save this for the offline meeting that we'll follow I'll tell folks about that in a moment um so another point and this is an interesting one and again I don't know whether Francis which of you would like to take this we didn't talk about um subcontractors supplies or specific tax populations now the subcontract one is an interesting one because I've been watching what's been going on with ESG reporting and in some ways it felt to me like an earlier example of what we're seeing when it comes to um some of the ways in which we're doing um clearance model in that it starts with the big organizations having to report things like their vulnerability to climate change and you know carbon footprint and it's inevitably flowing down the supply chain so the big organizations then go to the smaller organizations that Supply them and say well we need this to status that we can complete it and then the smaller organizations go to the yet smaller ones and so on and so forth so I guess would either of you like to give some thoughts about well how do we take this into account you know where we've got sub contractors or we're just saying that we're one step removed from that we have a relationship with our direct suppliers and is it to them to figure out how they deal with their supply um I'd say I'd look at this question from a slightly different perspective uh related steel and that's what we're looking at data privacy and and data how it's handled so there with with gdpr and so on there's a very big importance on where your data is stored to whom is given for what and what can happen with your data and there it well with most operators you will sign an agreement and the operator will make promises to you in terms of how that data will be handled and how their compliant with gdpr in terms of ESG so in terms of how you manage your suppliers for from uh so how your medicine subcontractors from an environmental and social perspective and so on that's again going back to the ratings of the ESG where yes is a good tool to see both of us for example password and our competitors the other place in the markets their ratings and we're happy to supply from our city lists Supply a list of subcontractors where they are with their ratings hey thanks very much Gustav and um Francois let me see if I can come to you because the other part of France uh Francois Bonnet the question was about specific tax population so I'd like to know if you've got a comment about that yes thanks is a is a very interesting uh it's a very interesting issue I would say because we said that for clearance model we have at least one model per countries but for taxis we have more than one model per countries and so we are in in some of the countries we have Regional taxis you know local taxis so to be honest taxis is a nightmare so anything that's going to help you to manage tax in your invoice incoming invoices would be very helpful so what what we do use in that kind of when we do electronic invoices what we will do we will make a special part of the project work on taxes and work on prediction tables you can have an and we can set up prediction tables as long as we got the information we can set a prediction table that will help you to put the taxes in the right box basically okay use the right tax code or the right tax information and even populate some information in your internal system to ease the reporting process to your government because tax is about reporting to your government okay so every everything and everything that was difficult with paper invoices or non-electronic invoices will be eased by using electronic invoices because you will have a relevant information you won't you won't make any errors in capturing the the numbers which which is when you use paper invoices it's it's very often that you will make errors in capturing the information so with electronic invoices you won't do any capturing errors that you and you can have some prediction tables that will tell you okay I have that kind of purchase category that kind of supplier that kind of goods whatever and I will put that in the relevant tax code so every and that's something the computers can do quite easily is decide based on a given rules and you can also include some artificial intelligence about about that but first of all you will have the the having the tax properly um processed means you have the tax properly captured on the invoice and again this brings back to the to the studio the supplier which has the responsibility to populate properly the invoice okay so it's not just about you it's about also your supplier to put the right information in the right place wonderful thank you very much Francois yes I think that this is one of the areas when you have good reliable data there's nowhere to hide when it comes to mistake you can't really debate whether that was a one um a capital I or a lowercase L that was in that field it pretty much is what it is um and anything we can do to streamline um efforts around tax I think it's got to be a good thing although I hear tax accountants now howling in anguish that they're going to be out of a job if we carry on this way don't worry government is always very keen on getting taxed they'll come up with something new and that's something that I think is quite important because this is not a static environment it's constantly changing so I'm going to come back to Gustav with one extra question so as we were talking I was really thinking about this because we talked about the complexity and the volatility in these regimes so good stuff I'd really like to understand in just a couple of minutes if you wouldn't mind how can basware help with managing this change that's constantly going through you've got the compliance map we can see what's going on in the world but clearly you're at the core of a solution so what is it that bassware can add into this that makes our lives a little bit easier well the first point I would say is this webinar help educating people about what needs to be done what's happening in the world and so on how can you go forward second part is Jose technical enablements making sure that we Supply a tool that enables you to be compliant and compliance is not just what we talked about with how we transmit invoice with post order versus clearance code files is about how invoices are Arc archived it is about what formats are used and what channels are used it's about what data has to be present on an invoice with to be a legal invoice it's about how it's to be reported and those are kind of things we need a good system to work on so that would be the second the technical element and then the third is shall say a bit more helping with change management when we look at at where what we sell a password it's a very big thing big delays so say the system but a big chunk as well is helping with change management so that's where we have our expert consultants and our expert Partners who are able to work with you with using your best practices and lets us learn from others and on how to implement all of this right thank you very much good stuff yeah and you touched on um actually all three things it's a combination of having the right processes the right Technologies and the other platform and change management for people um and yeah for my observation into this the best way to enable change management is to demonstrate to other people how you help them so what's in it for them what do they benefit how do suppliers benefit how do your AP team benefit how does the organization benefit anyway I've got an eye on the time we're just about out of time so let me just pick up on a couple of things that I was listening to as we were going through so what I was hearing was that Ian voicing is coming there's no getting away from it um it's actually it's good thing anyway but if you're or if your territory is not already doing it they will um it's just too attractive for governments particularly the compliance model I think the clearance model is ideal for them secondly as we just mentioned um transformation implies that there's change and if you've got change you need to manage it the third thing I would point out is that in my experience um transformation programs do go astray but it's often as a result of not choosing the right partner and by that I mean choose a partner that will help you identify what it is that you need to do that was my question about was so much changing all the time how can we as individuals possibly stay on top of all of that or choose a partner that can help you so choose a partner that is keeping their finger on these multiple pulses and bringing Solutions forward but also can tell you what questions you should be asking not just the ones that are in the requirements and they'll also help you prioritize those requirements and come up with a timeline and clearly you can have the right tooling from an organization like bassware which will enable you to do that it will cover a lot of the world but there will always be some exceptions so you need somebody who can help you with that as well so then what are we going to do next well we're going to reach out to everybody that's on the webinar and give you an opportunity to keep asking those questions or have a conversation in a one-to-one environment I look at that as a way of picking the brains of some of the most talented people in the marketplace so look out for those emails take advantage of that opportunity to continue this conversation going but making it super specific to you and with that all that really remains for me to do is to firstly thank our two experts so thank you Gustav thank you Francois you were excellent um I really as you may have seen been taking loads of notes I want to thank bazware for their sponsorship because without them this wouldn't have happened neither would it have happened without the eln but doing all the organizing and the logistics in the background but last but by no means least I want to thank all of you for your attention um and until the next time take care now Cheerio bye-bye thank you [Music]