Is e-Invoicing Worth the Investment?

By Rod Agona, Managing Director of EIPP, INTTRA

I recently spoke with two global ocean shipping companies, Hamburg Süd, a global carrier, and Hillebrand Group, a global freight forwarder, about why they made the decision to switch from manual to electronic invoicing (e-invoicing). What benefits motivated them to become early adopters of INTTRA’s eInvoice solution?

Hamburg Süd was seeing too many paper-based invoices get lost and therefore not paid on time. Hillebrand Group wanted to drive out inefficiencies by feeding electronic invoice data into their systems for additional automation like rate-matching and internal routing. For both companies, it was clear they understood and recognized the win-win opportunity. 

We established in my previous articles the urgency behind eInvoice adoption in ocean shipping today, and how electronic invoicing can boost customer service and overall data quality. In this article, we provide the direct insights from two global shipping organizations about why they made the switch.

INTTRA: Why did you switch from manual to electronic invoicing?

Hamburg Süd: We were receiving increasing demand from our clients to go electronic. Providing instant delivery gives them extra time to verify, process and settle invoices. It is more effective since the invoice data feed we send our customers can be routed internally to the appropriate person by their own IT systems. Lastly, the “lost invoice” problem goes away because there is always a clear and transparent audit trail.

Hillebrand: We are striving to achieve standardization, improved efficiency and accuracy. As a global company, we strongly believe in standardized processes and tools. This makes it much easier to collaborate internally and with external partners and customers. With standard solutions, we can build once and re-use many times. After standardization and automation of booking, shipping instructions, and status events, the logical next step is to exchange invoices.

INTTRA: What are the top pain points with manual invoicing that e-invoicing solves?

Hamburg Süd: Our top pain points have been lost invoices and late payments. Paper invoices are limited in the amount of information that can be included from our standard billing system. Using EDI allows us to pass more data to our customers and speed things up. For instance, adding shipper reference numbers allows for faster shipment identification and internal routing, and adding standardized charge codes enables faster invoice approval. This simply cannot be done with paper invoices.

Hillebrand: First, we can avoid the manual routing of invoices through the internal organization. Invoices will automatically end up in the office and file where they belong and be available electronically for everybody in the organization. In combination with our internal matching processes, we strive to process a high percentage of the invoices automatically, without user intervention. Tests so far in France have shown that we can reach 60-70 percent automatic processing and matching. E-invoicing allows us to centralize the processing of invoices in a limited number of shared service centers instead of having each office process its own invoices.

INTTRA: What other benefits are you seeing now with e-invoicing?

Hamburg Süd: Electronic invoicing is beneficial on both sides of the equation – for the sender and, even more so, for the receiver when incoming data is processed electronically. The complexity to adjust systems for individual data requirements will reduce the benefit noticeably. A standard that meets the requirements of the vast majority of market participants will mitigate special requests tremendously.

Hillebrand: Another advantage is we have an electronic trail of all invoices we receive, regardless of whether they were correct or incorrect. This makes checking statements of carriers much easier, as we can check the ‘missing invoices’ in our incoming (but not approved) invoices log. We have a full trace on these invoices, which makes the dialogue with carriers on statements and payments much easier.

INTTRA: Why e-invoicing now vs. any other time?

Hamburg Süd: The tipping point when we decided to make the switch was driven by increasing customer demand representing enough volume to justify the investment.

Hillebrand:  It was the logical next step as a smart IT investment. For years we spent resources on optimizing the core shipping processes that directly affect customer service and efficiency. Now we can also focus on supporting processes like invoice handling. Also, we now have internal routing and matching mechanisms in place, which allow us to auto-check invoices against accruals.

Learn more at www.inttra.com/e-invoicing.