BPC e-invoice exchange: A guide to the U.S. e-invoicing pilot

Currently in the United States, companies face many process inefficiencies with paper and PDF-based B2B documents. This includes closed network infrastructure and systems that cannot communicate with each other, adding up to 85% more spent on manual resources, costs and time than necessary. According to the BPC, 25% of invoices are sent electronically in the U.S. market. However, few of them can be considered actual e-invoices.

For example, many in the market today claim that an invoice PDF attached to an email, but the invoice attached does not contain any structured data, and the buyer has to print it out and/or manually key the invoice information into their system for further processing.

Adoption of true e-invoicing is still in the early stages in the U.S. However, the largest companies have already started benefiting from this faster way of communication and it is starting to make its mark as more organizations learn about the immense benefits of electronic invoicing. Not only does digitalizing your invoice process lead to saved costs, increased sustainability, and highly efficient business practices, but your organization will also open the door to higher invoice data accuracy and better cash flow.

In other countries around the globe, e-invoicing is mandatory. Businesses must be prepared to fit the requirements, fueling the exponential growth of e-invoicing. Using electronic invoicing outside of these requirements also carries great benefits that will help future-proof your organization.

The Business Payments Coalition (BPC) is a group of over 600 organizations and individuals in the U.S. working together to promote greater adoption of electronic business-to-business (B2B) payments, remittance data and invoices.

According to the BPC, "The BPC's wide-ranging goal is to make B2B electronic payments more efficient across the end-to-end process, that is, to achieve straight-through processing across both the procure-to-pay and order-to-cash cycles. The BPC accomplishes this objective by addressing problems and barriers that make it difficult for business to use electronic alternatives to paper checks, remittance data and invoices". 

The BPC E-invoice Exchange Market Pilot is an effort to enable businesses of all kinds to exchange electronic invoices. As the world goes more digital and the number of invoices is expected to quadruple by 2025, U.S. organizations must keep up with the modernization of B2B payments. An electronic exchange framework is a set of standards, policies and guidelines enabling businesses to connect once, and exchange with anyone on the exchange framework, independent of their platform, system or application.

Similar to email exchange frameworks, the e-invoice exchange framework operates very similarly. According to the BPC, “With email networks, email users sign up with an email provider (e.g. Gmail) to send and receive emails. The email providers then serve as access points into email exchanges for their users and deliver emails between users over the internet. The email network effect allows a user to sign up once, and then connect and exchange emails with many others in the network.”

The BPC has announced that 77 organizations have joined together so far to create the BPC e-invoice exchange pilot, including Pagero. This initiative will enable businesses to exchange e-invoices and go fully digital.

E-invoicing greatly benefits and transforms organizations, along with supporting their digital transformation journeys. Key benefits from electronic invoicing include lower costs, reduced manual work, better cash management, error reduction, risk mitigation, increased transparency and improved efficiency.

Pagero is a global organization on a mission to make buying and selling easy. With the largest global business network and as a market leader with decades of expertise in e-invoicing, Pagero is taking an active role in the BPC work groups for the pilot’s launch. We are is excited to help the U.S. get started on a wide scale and help all organizations – big and small – future-proof their invoicing processes!

For years, Pagero has taken leading roles in similar e-invoicing frameworks in other regions across the globe. For example, we have been and continue to be a driving force in both OpenPeppol and EESPA which began in Europe back in 2008. Peppol is currently used in 31 European countries, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Singapore, South Africa and the United States. In this initiative, Pagero has helped businesses all over the world connect and exchange e-documents via Peppol and is ready to do the same with the BPC in the United States.

The BPC e-invoice pilot will create an opportunity for organizations of all industries, both large and small, to reap the benefits of electronic invoicing. In turn, this will help your organization save resources and create business efficiencies while promoting sustainability.

“We are excited to see this initiative to modernize e-document exchange in the U.S. and we look forward to being a part of it. With our extensive experience leading similar projects in other countries, we have helped influence the worldwide adoption of e-invoicing and are excited to invite the U.S. to this modern way of communication. As we have seen in other countries, a standardized and open way for businesses to communicate more efficiently will benefit everyone”, says Erik Modh, Pagero’s Managing Director of North America.

Learn more about electronic invoicing and its benefits and stay up to date on the latest e-invoicing framework news by signing up for our Compliance Monitor. If your organization would like to be a part of the pilot and be a part of the future towards e-invoicing, sign up for a free demo below.