Easy e-invoicing for Norway’s SME’s

All suppliers selling to the Norwegian state must from next summer send their invoices electronically. One-man firms (like the local carpenter) rarely have their own e-procurement systems and need easy to use web tools where they can produce their invoices. Difi is now inviting suppliers offering web-based invoicing solutions to adapt their solutions to the Norwegian PEPPOL-enabled format for e-invoicing.
Next year as of 1st of July, all suppliers, also small and medium sizes businesses (SME’s), must send their invoices electronically to the Norwegian public sector. This also applies to one-man firms, which are more than half of the private businesses in Norway. The invoices must be sent with the format EHF, a Norwegian implementation of the PEPPOL business interoperability specifications (BIS).
We cannot expect that SME’s have their own e-procurement solutions installed. Therefore, the above-mentioned scenario will be difficult to achieve unless private sector can offer several web-based e-invoicing services.
Today there are over fifty suppliers offering web-invoicing in Norway, but only one supplier is ready to produce electronic invoices on EHF format. 

Business opportunity for suppliers of electronic invoicing 
The director general of the Norwegian Agency for Public Management and e-Government (Difi), Hans Christian Holte, invites suppliers to a dialogue meeting regarding web-based e-invoicing services for the public sector.
 To ensure a fair competition it is desirable that as many suppliers as possible offers electronic invoicing in the EHF format implementing PEPPOL BIS. Difi will now follow up this matter with the industry to ensure the existence of a broad selection of web based e-invoicing solutions available to the SME’s. In this way a free flow of invoices from SME’s can be assured, both within Norway and cross-border in Europe. “Such updated solutions will indeed be a business opportunity", says Difi’s director general.
About the PEPPOL project
PEPPOL (Pan-European Public Procurement Online) is a Large Scale Pilot project under the European Commission Competitiveness and Innovation Programme (CIP) ICT Policy Support Programme (ICT-PSP).
Many EU countries use electronic procurement (eProcurement) to make bidding for and satisfying public sector contracts simpler and more efficient. However, these solutions are often implemented as isolated islands within Member States, with limited communication towards other eProcurement communities and cross member state-borders. PEPPOL will enable the connection of existing eProcurement communities, which is essential to allow businesses to bid for public sector contracts anywhere in the EU: an important step towards achieving the Single European Market.
Links
www.peppol.eu