Looking back on 2013

2013 was the year when paper and e-mail invoicing was overtaken by structured e-invoicing in Finland. This is now happening with accelerating speed all over the world as governments and other payment receivers are setting migration deadlines. 

In Finland this also meant that the Real Time Economy program could put full attention on what can be automated once migration to structured e-invoicing has happened.

The first thing to do here is automation of VAT and sales tax reporting by service providers automatically extracting the needed data from e-invoices and sending it on invoice senders' behalf to tax. Harmonization of VAT-reporting is a high priority for the EU commission and the work done both in Finland and the ISO20022 Tax report standard developed should be very useful in the following concrete phases.

The next thing - which also has been specified - was how to use account statements for automation of accounting. The same solution can also be used for automated cash flow estimates.

The most important recommendations from the Finnish Real Time Economy program was adopted with very high priority in the national ICT2015 initiative.

So - 2013 was a very good year. 2014 will be even better.