A Nordic-Baltic collaboration uses CEF eInvoice and eDelivery to achieve standard compliance, cost savings, and efficiency in the public sector, as well as expanded cross-border opportunities in the private sector.
Quick facts
- Members of the consortium :
- Estonian Information Technology and Telecommunications Association (ITL) as project manager
- Estonian Post (Estonia)
- Telema AS (Estonia)
- Tieto Estonia
- Tieto Finland
- Latvian Information and Communication Technology Association (LIKTA)
- Project : Business Internet
- Challenge How can we ensure that all business transactions flow between organizations automatically and in real time?
- The solution Estonia is taking the first step toward achieving a real-time economy through electronic invoicing.
- Building Blocks Innovation and eDelivery
- Financed by the EU : 75%
The agile and ambitious Estonia
When it comes to IT infrastructure, Estonia's small size works to its advantage. Project implementations are smaller, making it easier for the country to be agile and achieve ambitious goals and visions. Estonia's vision is to enable Real-time economy (RTE), a concept in which all business transactions, such as orders and invoices, move between organizations automatically and in real time.
While achieving RTE will take more than a decade and will require significant investments and changes in people's mindsets, the Estonian Information Technology and Telecommunications Association (ITL) decided to start with electronic invoicing. ITL sought partners to share the workload and found them in Estonia and in neighboring countries: Latvia and Finland.
The partner organizations formed a consortium under the project name ‘Internet of Business.’ With the participation of some of the largest e-invoicing operators from Estonia and Finland, the project's impact was significant. The partners have been driven primarily by achieving compliance with the European standard for electronic invoicing (EN 16931) – as well as the will to reduce costs and increase efficiency.
Access to and from anywhere in Europe
The project began in 2016, and in 2017 they received funding from the European Commission's program for The European Aid (CEF) of European Commission. CEF finances IT infrastructure projects and provides ready-made digital building blocks to help Europeans develop digital services faster and more easily. The consortium decided to implement electronic invoicing with PEPPOL, an agreement framework that allows its participants to connect to a shared network. PEPPOL, also partially funded by the EU, uses specifications and technologies from the CEF building blocks. e-Delivery and the Electronic invoicing . eDelivery defines the common specifications and sample software for the secure and reliable exchange of documents, in this case electronic invoices. The eInvoicing building block provides services that support the implementation of the European standard for electronic invoicing. Therefore, it supports the deployment of standards-compliant solutions that enable the sending of electronic invoices across borders.
How CEF building blocks are helping Estonia
The consortium chose PEPPOL and the core CEF building blocks because they are mature, fully tested, well supported, and widely approved. PEPPOL already has an extensive existing network that connects its members to each other. This access to and from all participating members is of great value to Estonia. Considering Estonia's vision for a real-time economy, e-Delivery it will also help Estonia expand into other areas, such as electronic order exchange and eDeliveryt electronics in the future. Furthermore, CEF Electronic invoicing It is essential for achieving compliance with the European standard.
The current technical implementation began on June 1, 2017, and continued until August 31, 2018. The most difficult part proved to be the mapping of documents between the European standard and the national standard. The standard leaves room for interpretation, and each project partner had a different understanding of what the specifications entail. The differences were discussed and agreed upon, and the resulting e-invoice format has now been approved by the Estonian Ministry of Finance as a best practice. For document exchange, PEPPOL access points (AP) and Service Metadata Publishers (SMP) were implemented and integrated based on the eDelivery specifications.
Estonia sees itself as a small, agile demo site for larger countries, with the luxury of making mistakes and correcting them quickly. To learn more about Estonia's solution, visit the project's website to read about its results:
Empowering the private sector
Although Estonia is now in compliance with the European standard, one feature remains – The Estonian public sector lacks invoice processing capabilities. . Invoice processing is outsourced to private-sector SMEs, which act as billing operators. The Estonian government did not want to disrupt the private sector by taking away businesses that were making profits. The ultimate solution benefits both the public and private sectors of Estonia by allowing each to focus on what they do best.
Among the main benefits are time savings, which allow economic operators to focus on more critical and profitable business activities. Furthermore, the standard supports cross-border trade. This means that service providers in smaller countries, such as Estonia, Latvia, and Finland, can now enjoy greater interoperability and find clients beyond their country's borders.
“Considering that in Estonia you can set up a company in under 20 minutes, we believe that managing a business should be just as easy as starting one. This is what CEF is helping us achieve. Thanks to eInvoicing and eDelivery, Estonia has taken the first step toward a real-time economy. We are now open and accessible from all over Europe.“
Sirli Heinsoo, Business Internet Project Manager
Estonian Information Technology and Telecommunications Association (ITL)
Next steps
The next steps are the further integration of accounting software with electronic invoicing and the standardization of all data transactions for automated business reporting. Since electronic invoices can be exported from accounting programs in the EU format, the need for conversion is eliminated and no information will be lost. It will also become even easier for invoices to move freely from one operator to another.
At the moment, the Estonian and EU standards will be supported by the government. However, the Estonian standard will no longer be updated. The EU standard is preferred by both e-invoicing operators and accounting service providers, who are leading the e-invoicing market. Therefore, the national standard is expected to fade out within 10 years.
Source: European Commission