E-invoicing is gaining traction in Australia and New Zealand, so what stages are the big cloud accounting firms at? We dive into the current state of play of e-invoicing for six key cloud accounting platforms used by small businesses in Australia and New Zealand.

(It should be noted that this is only small business accounting providers. The parties they invoice, and are invoiced by, are likely to be larger entities running ERP systems, and for e-invoicing to work, both ends need to invest in making PEPPOL standards easy to use – Editor)

Xero
Xero have shown their support for e-invoicing by buying Swedish e-invoicing provider Tickstar. They are currently going through the process of making it work within their normal process. Sending e-invoices has been enabled for customers, and the receiving of e-invoices is still being refined but should be ready for early adopters soon.

Xero has added an e-invoicing option to their invoice creation page. This puts the onus back on the business to know if their recipient is ready for e-invoicing or not. We expect this will change soon to offer a better user experience for their customers.

MYOB
MYOB are being very cautious about e-invoicing. They know they need to be a part of it, but they haven’t worked out what they want to do yet. They are hedging their bets and allowing three providers to operate from within their system.

MYOB AccountRight and Essentials users are shown a list of three e-invoicing providers and need to pick which one they want to work with. Once they’ve signed up, MYOB  users will be able to see a new ‘send as e-invoice button’ when they create an invoice.

QBO – QuickBooks Online
You may have noticed some events and marketing by Intuit in recent times. They have taken the angle to help inform and educate the market about e-invoicing. Their parent company is Intuit have two accredited e-invoicing access point providers within their app store to support e-invoicing in QBO.

Reckon
Reckon have been supporters of e-invoicing for some time and recommend one service provider to their users – and yes, that would be us here at Link4.

Saasu
Saasu have a loyal customer base who advocate their solution to other business people. Several of their users have been doing e-invoicing for more than three years. Saasu provide the name of one supplier, Link4, on their e-invoicing add – on page, and this works well for their users.

Money Works
MoneyWorks have done it the best that we’ve seen so far. E-invoicing comes standard with its latest release.

They partnered with Link4 and embedded the e-invoicing service within their solution and made it easy for the end user. I am sure we will see more of this type of approach as users demand a better experience.

So where are we heading?
When all of the software companies provide e-invoicing capabilities within their accounting packages, will there be a need for specialist e-invoicing providers?

Consider the services provided by the cloud accounting systems as ‘vanilla e-invoicing’. That is, they will provide the basics and cover the needs of 40 percent of the market.

The niche e-invoicing providers are independent and will continue to develop their solutions based on end user feedback. These providers will include things like approval processes (for sending and receiving invoices), reminders, invoice financing options, additional fields, other document types, etc.

These same independent providers are often providing a vanilla aspect of their services through accounting solutions, but you can also get far more functionality to meet your business needs if you go direct.

No matter how you look at it, e-invoicing has benefits for every business. It is good to see the cloud accounting companies getting on board to make it easier for more to join the growing e-invoicing network.

Written by Robin Sands, CEO of Australian e-invoicing Access Point Link4.