While Brazil and Mexico have led in the adoption of electronic invoicing, since its inception a little more than 20 years ago, the rest of the region in Latin America (LATAM) is advancing in short steps, at a pace that we can safely describe as slow.The recent events related to the pandemic have pushed many companies over the ledge, by not being able to maintain a minimum volume of business, especially related to the drop in consumer interactions, along with heavy regulations around human resources that forced them to keep payrolls going, leaving businesses with no alternative other than to declare bankruptcy.Argentina, the forerunner of electronic invoicing, has been one of the economies hardest hit by the global health crisis, reaching 11.8% in the unemployment rate for the 2020 fiscal year, as reported by the media citing the International Labor Organization (ILO).Despite available data that describes a difficult outlook for the LATAM economies, the region is projected as one of the most advanced in terms of electronic invoicing, ahead of economies in Europe or even North America, which describes a more open attitude towards information technologies in the financial field (FINTECH).In fact, FINTECHs have emerged in the marketplace serving a variety of emerging needs, creating food delivery applications, consumer commerce (B2C) portals, and in many cases enhancing customer experience as part of their business value proposition.
What is Electronic Invoicing?
Electronic invoicing is the set of regulatory and technological resources that companies, and businesses, use to optimize the exchange of goods and services, through data transactions between businesses (B2B) or between the company and the consumer (B2C), in order to comply with the legal framework established by regulatory organisms that each economy has on fiscal matters.In a way, electronic invoicing offers benefits in terms of costs, notably reducing the consumption of resources that favors the environment, as well as company finances.Another immediate benefit consists in the reduction of processing time for each transaction, which in terms of money represents lower costs, all whilst reducing errors introduced by the people in tasks such as transcriptions, reception, and document filing, up to vendor payment processing.Contrary to what could be inferred as an opportunity to replace accounting personnel with technological resources, electronic invoicing allows people to be reassigned to tasks of financial analysis and profiles with higher productivity, by incorporating additional tools for business intelligence (BI) and similar.Finally, it is important to mention that electronic invoicing increases the levels of security and the emerging confidence in the use of these solutions, creating an ecosystem of companies that by adopting this type of technology position themselves as capable of reducing costs for the benefit of their customers, increasing in the process the levels of customer satisfaction.
