With Johan Bjørling, Managing Director at efacto.
How are regulation, digitalisation, and emerging technologies like AI influencing our work with electronic invoicing? What trends are shaping our industry? And how do we navigate them in practice?
These are some of the questions we’ve asked five different employees at efacto. In the coming weeks, we’ll share their insights and perspectives, each based on their specific professional role. We hope you’ll follow along.
The e-invoicing industry is constantly evolving. And efacto is evolving with it.
In this interview, our Managing Director, Johan Bjørling, shares his perspectives on a rapidly changing industry.
In the Nordic region, we’re seeing a continued expansion of e-invoicing within the private sector. This is especially true for companies that want to receive supplier invoices as e-invoices instead of PDFs, which are time-consuming to interpret and process.
At a European level, we’re seeing more and more countries introducing legislation on e-invoice reception, which will force many companies across Europe to both send and receive e-invoices. The market dynamics are largely driven by regulation. Naturally, we’re keeping a close eye on that so we can act in time and launch the right initiatives as a stable e-invoice market emerges.
The act of sending and receiving e-invoices is now a standard service. Our strength lies in helping companies leverage the opportunities that arise when receiving e-invoices from suppliers. This is typically an area with a great deal of manual work, which we can both automate and digitise – resulting in significant efficiency gains.
In practice, this means we become our customers’ process consultants. We help optimise the entire invoice reception process so that invoices contain the necessary information and can be fully processed (approved, posted and paid) automatically in the customer’s ERP or workflow system.
AI is a gamechanger. We see that AI enables us to develop our solutions faster and with higher quality. AI contributes to much better processes for our customers, and an AI robot like our product, InvoiceFirewall, works 24/7, 365 days a year.
This doesn’t mean that employees in accounting departments should fear for their jobs. On the contrary, the technology frees up time and resources, allowing them to focus on more value-creating tasks instead of manually validating supplier invoices day in and day out.
Definitely InvoiceFirewall. It’s a truly intelligent solution that creates great value for our customers.
Our goal is to be well established in Sweden by then. Perhaps also in several other European countries, depending on which regulations come into effect and whether we assess the timing to be right for efacto.
We expect annual growth of around 15%. That means that in five years we’ll be nearly twice the size we are today. InvoiceFirewall will be our core solution in the expansion, and there will be new, exciting modules added that will provide both existing and new customers with even more savings and efficiency gains.
Think big, but with care. Make sure that your ambitions don’t exceed what the foundation can support, and avoid taking financial risks that could break the company.