Unifiedpost Group expands into France and partners with France’s ECMA to launch new digital accounting platform jefacture.com
La Hulpe, 7 May 2020 – Unifiedpost Group has partnered with Expert-Comptable Media Association (ECMA), the French organisation responsible for providing digital tools to chartered accountants, to launch its latest digital accounting platform in France. Both parties signed the agreement on 22 April 2020.
Created at the initiative of the chartered accountant profession in France, Expert-Comptable Media Association (ECMA), a French Association governed by the Association Act of 1 July 1901, is responsible for providing digital tools to chartered accountants and is launching jefacture.com in April 2020.
In France, the chartered accountancy profession is represented by almost 20,000 practitioners who support the vast majority of 2,000,000 SMEs in France and in overseas departments and territories.
The agreement will enable Unifiedpost Group to expand into France as it continues to assert its position as the leading cloud platform for document, identity and payment-based services for SMEs: “Our entry into the French market will open up new opportunities for our services to drive digital transformation across European accounting practise,” says Hans Leybaert, general manager of the group. “Our entry into this market will follow a similar trajectory to our launch in Belgium, where we work alongside chartered accountants to develop systems and tools that met their needs, as well as those of their clients. This industry cooperation is exactly what we want to achieve, as it ensures our platforms always meet the aspirations of their users.”
Jefacture.com is not the first national ecosystem of the Unifiedpost Group. In Belgium, Unifiedpost has also developed a platform called BilltoBox for the community of chartered accountants, tax advisors and their clients (Belgium has more than 900,000 SMEs).
In Serbia, Unifiedpost created a B2B electronic invoicing platform at the behest of the government.
An identical platform was created in Slovakia at the request of a leading group of accounting firms.
The agricultural sector in the Netherlands uses its ecosystem under the name of AGROBOX.
Estonia uses the ecosystem of Unifiedpost for all invoices sent to government services (ARVED.EE). The same applies in Latvia and Lithuania.
The French jefacture.com ecosystem is compatible with the Belgian BilltoBox, whereby French invoices are compatible with those of Belgian organisations and vice-versa.
“This shows that we have the knowledge and capacity to develop compatible accounting ecosystems across Europe,” Mr Leybaert added.
Jefacture.com adopts the Factur-X standard for mixed electronic invoices in PDF or XML (the same standard as its German counterpart: ZUGFeRD 2.0). It also represents the first implementation of the European semantic standard EN 16931, published by the European Commission on 16 October 2017.
An expectation of professionals
The platform was presented to the profession at the 7th Congress of the order which brought together some 7000 chartered accountants in Paris. On that occasion, the ECMA was able to gauge the keen interest of the profession. A sizeable majority of chartered accountants signed up for jefacture.com seminars and demonstrations.
Jefacture.com aims to play a leading role in driving the widespread use of electronic invoices by the accounting profession that has been announced by public authorities.
jefacture.com: a one-step stop for all the company’s invoices
jefacture.com retrieves (by e-mail, picking, uploading photo e.g.) the company’s purchase and sale invoices. jefacture.com then carries out OCR processing, supplemented by video coding by an operator, thereby freeing the company or accounting firm employee from this tedious step.At the end of both legal and business audits, jefacture.com generates these invoices in Factur-X format (PDF + XML data). These invoices and those received natively in Factur-X format are sealed and archived for a minimum of 10 years.
jefacture.com distributes the sales invoices to the company’s clients
APIs will be made available to publishers, allowing jetfacture.com to automatically retrieve sales invoices issued by invoicing software. Once processed, sales invoices are transmitted according to the distribution method required by each client (e-mail, Chorus Pro, desktop publishing, EDI…).This system also enables the firm to offer its clients invoicing outsourcing.