"My e-invoicing implementation was easier and quicker than I expected." Said nobody. Ever.
Underneath that sarcastic line, there is a lot to unpack. I'll start from the e-invoicing provider's point of view. No other software category gets implemented quite like e-invoicing, and that is exactly why mandate projects so often turn into a nightmare.
How software normally gets implemented
In most software markets, implementation work arrives at a steady pace. A sales team can only close so many deals at once, and customers sign when they are ready rather than all at the same moment. Together, those two limits smooth out the peaks. New projects join the implementation conveyor belt one after another, and completed projects come off the other end at a similar rate. Implementation teams can plan, staff and deliver against a predictable flow of work.
E-invoicing providers get no such luck. When a government sets a go-live date, every provider has to get every affected customer live on that same date.
The finish line is only the beginning
This is not just a stressful race to the finish line. Once the mandate goes live, a provider may have hundreds of customers in hypercare at the same time. Many of them will never have handled electronic documents before. That makes the period after go-live even more time-consuming, and more stressful, for provider and customer alike.
Imagine a hospital ward admitting three months' worth of patients in a single day, then being told that every one of them must be treated and discharged on the same date. That is the position providers find themselves in when a mandate goes live.
It is next to impossible to staff for waves like this. Dig a little deeper and another layer of complexity appears. The recent French mandate meant scaling up French-speaking delivery resources. Germany meant bringing in as many SAP experts as the market could find. Then those mandates wind down, and the sudden requirement is Spanish language skills and Oracle expertise instead.
Why the pressure keeps building
Several forces make this worse. The first is timing. Too many companies leave their decision until the last minute, which compresses an already crowded implementation window and leaves no room to recover when something goes wrong.
The second is the way some governments design their programmes. I used to call it the golden rule of e-invoicing: do not change the requirements when you move from manual to electronic invoicing. Adding new requirements at the same time as the transition is tempting. It looks like an efficient way to collect more data. In practice, it creates an unprecedented burden for everyone taking part in the programme. Companies are no longer simply digitising an existing process. They are digitising it and redesigning it at once.
The third force is the one companies most often overlook. The part of the project a provider controls is only the tip of the iceberg. Companies regularly underestimate the work they need to do on their side, in their own systems, data and processes. When that work starts late, no amount of effort from the provider can bring the go-live date back within reach.
The main reason is usually straightforward. Companies underestimate how much work it takes to get their data ready. Moving from what is, more often than not, a fully manual process to a fully electronic one does not happen overnight, however much the mandate timeline demands it.
What can be done about it?
The most effective step is also the simplest: commit early. A company that chooses its provider well ahead of the deadline secures a place on the implementation conveyor belt before the queue forms. That buys time to complete the internal work that only the company itself can do.
It also pays to bring in 3rd parties who can assist with implementations. Partners add an extra bench of implementation resource and expertise, so a project depends less on one provider's team at the busiest moment in the cycle.
Just as important, a mandate should not be a company's first experience of handling electronic documents. The wise company chooses its provider well before the mandate arrives, or even before e-invoicing is mandated at all, and asks that provider to digitise all of its invoices regardless of their current format.
This lets the company face the inevitable data challenges, and make the process changes that come with moving from manual to electronic, at its own pace. By the time the mandate goes live, handling invoices digitally is already business as usual rather than a sudden change.
Finally, companies should recognise that Accounts Payable can often be biggest headache in any e-invoicing project. Getting invoices into your systems is almost always far harder than pulling data out of them, so the receiving side deserves the most attention, the most planning and the earliest start.
The bottom line
E-invoicing mandates turn a steady stream of implementations into one enormous wave, and every company caught in it competes for the same limited resources at the same time. The companies that get through calmly are the ones that started early, spread the load across partners, built digital invoicing habits before they were forced to, and put AP at the centre of their plans.
Do all that, and maybe next time, someone finally says the implementation wasn't so bad after all.