DHL moves over to e-invoices

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DHL, the German-owned parcel delivery company, is automating its accounts receivable (AR) processes across the UK and Europe with a new electronic invoicing service.

The project to deploy an e-invoicing application and update manually intensive AR processes is also essential for the carrier to comply with European regulations that came into force in 2004 that mandate local taxation authorities to accept electronic versions of invoices.

Brian Thumwood, e-billing programme manager for DHL, said: "Printing, posting, delivering and managing many bulky, complex paper invoices each month was an expensive and time-consuming process, not only for us but for our customers as well, who were a primary driving force behind the implementation of our e-invoicing application."

Thumwood said, following a successful pilot in Belgium that began last year, the company is now rolling the web-based application out to a further 12 countries during this year and the next.

DHL now generates and manages VAT compliant and multilingual e-invoices using electronic invoicing presentment and payment (EIPP) systems from secure financial document exchange and payment systems provider, Accountis Europe.

The EIPP system integrates with DHL's existing complex finance systems to consolidate disparate invoice data and make it available for efficient processing via the Accountis hub.

Using a branded e-invoicing portal, the DHL finance team can now generate, send and manage invoices from one secure location. All new and archived e-invoice data is available 24 hours a day, from any location and customised workflow functions ensure that business processes and data flows are streamlined and audited.

He added that DHL sends out 18 million invoices a year in Europe, "so it was essential to make it as easy as possible for customers to be able to manage our invoices using email, web-based or EDI [electronic data interchange] systems".

As a result, DHL has so far managed to reduce the amount of invoices sent in each European country operation where the system has been rolled out by over a third. Thumwood also said it has cut the cost of manually managing paper-based systems and increased the accuracy and customer service levels of its AR operations.

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