We have collaborated with automation and BPO company, Converga, to launch a new business e-invoicing platform, aimed at companies in Australia and the Asia-Pacific region.

The e-invoicing platform, which is powered by our PaletteArena accounts payable suite and goes lives early next month, provides transaction brokering between buyers and suppliers, and will help customers to cut their transaction costs, speed up invoice processing times, and enhance supplier relationships.

E-invoicing services give both suppliers and purchasers better control over their cash flow, through faster, more accurate and efficient accounting processes. Converga has an excellent track record in delivering advanced outsourced services to businesses in the region, making them the natural choice of partner for this hosted solution.

Paul Bellette, general manager, sales and marketing for Converga said: “We’re already seeing strong interest from our customers: at launch we expect to be handling over 60,000 invoices per month, and this is likely to double by the end of 2012.”

There’s more information at:  http://www.bobsguide.com/guide/news/2012/Mar/22/palette-delivers-e-invoicing-platform-to-australia-and-asia-pacific-region.html

The UK Government’s Business and Enterprise Minister, Mark Prisk, hosted a workshop with a range of industry bodies to discuss the changing culture of late payments, and how businesses can work together to develop practical solutions to create better cashflow management systems.

Representatives from the Institute of Credit Management (ICM), the Forum of Private Business (FPB) and the Association of Certified Charted Accountants (ACCA) attended the workshop to discuss the increasingly frequent problem of late payments, which create significant cashflow problems for SMEs.

As part of the Government’s Finance Fitness campaign to support UK SMEs, they have worked alongside businesses to develop the Prompt Payment Code (PPC), which looks to encourage and promote best practice between organisations and their suppliers. Over 1000 of the UK biggest businesses are already signed up.

Mark Prisk said: “By looking at which business sectors have good practice and those that don’t we can start to identify where practical improvements can be made and understand the behaviours that lead to a culture of late payment. It’s vital that all business sectors understand the importance that prompt payment has in the cashflow management of a business.”

We couldn’t put it better ourselves.  You can read more about the workshop and the Government’s Prompt Payment Code here:  http://blogs.bis.gov.uk/blog/2012/03/08/prompting-faster-payments/

It’s sometimes said that you can gauge the success of a technology or initiative because someone will develop a criminal scam related to it.  Unfortunately, e-invoicing is no exception, according to a report on Shared Services Link:  http://www.sharedserviceslink.com/file/94374/einvoice-scam-uncovered.html

It reports  that networking company Cisco’s Security Intelligence Operations has detected "significant activity" related to spam email messages claiming to contain electronic invoices.

Written in Portuguese, the fake invoices direct recipients to .zip files that can infect their computers with virus software related to the Trojan.Win32.Generic family.  Once installed on a user's machine, these download malicious files including a ‘back door’, enabling interrogation from a remote host.

As with any digital transactional system, security is paramount.  This threat should be nullified by updated anti-virus software and firewalls, but it’s certainly worth noting as more organisations move to e-invoicing.