As with many other European countries, Norway is switching its government accounting systems to accept electronic invoices. From the 1^st July 2012, business will have to present invoices to the Government electronically. The Norwegian Agency for Public Management and e-Government (Difi) have selected a specialist format known as Electronisk Handels Format (EHF), a secondary subset of UBL 2.0.

The overall aim of implementing e-Invoicing is to reduce the costs associated with manual processing and payments. Similar projects in other countries have demonstrated that such a roll-out does indeed generate significant cost savings.

Industry experts are concerned about the burdens placed on smaller businesses providing products and services to the government who may not have access to their own in-house e-Procurement solutions. The Norwegian government however is assuring companies in this position that they will be able to outsource these business processes to hosted service providers as is the case in other countries.

But herein lies a major problem. Despite there being over 50 companies offering electronic business to government (B2G) electronic invoicing, only one is capable of generating invoices in the required EHF format. At the moment there is no competition in the outsourced e-invoicing market in Norway. Consequently the incumbent service providers are lobbying hard for incentives to produce the necessary systems. The reasoning here is that if the government is making significant savings from this implementation, they can afford to share the spoils.

Despite this apparent paradox, the doomsayers are failing to recognise the interconnected nature of cloud services which extend beyond traditional national borders. Electronic Invoice Presentment and Payment (EIPP) systems such as Celtrino’s own Smart Admin platform accept input from virtually any data source before transforming it into the required output data type.  Where local service providers are unable to meet needs, the global market can step in and fill the gap.