Unifiedpost Group becomes partner of the Republic of Estonia for receiving purchase invoices

15/10/2020

La Hulpe

The financial technology company Fitek AS, part of Unifiedpost Group, won a public procurement of the Republic of Estonia and became a partner in receiving state purchase invoices for the next five years. Invoices are received with the help of the FitekIN solution. Fitek will also continue to provide outbound sales invoice solutions to the Republic of Estonia. Fitek's partner is the State Shared Service Centre of the Republic of Estonia, which deals with financial accounting.

CEO Fitek Estonia Andrus Kaarelson: “The Estonian state has been a pioneer of digitalization in the world and an example for other countries. The state has also set a good example to the private sector by showing that financial processes can be digitized, and paper invoices can be abandoned very quickly. Last year, we received 380,000 invoices sent to government agencies. If one invoice were to be tapped into a computer in one minute, it would take a minimum of 6300 hours to enter. That is a total of 780 working days, or more than two years."

Marek Ilves, Head of the Business Software Development Department of the State Shared Service Centre: “E-invoices have significantly reduced the time spent on processing purchase invoices for accountants of the State Shared Service Centre. Machine readability ensures error-free invoice information exchange between seller and buyer, making the purchase invoice process clearer and more manageable. We want to enable our customers to focus on their core business, offering effective solutions for organizing support services, especially through the digitization and automation of processes.”

According to the agreement, Fitek provides the following services to the State Shared Service Centre: receipt of purchase invoices, digitization, use of electronic invoice processing environment, data exchange with SAP unified business software, archiving of e-purchase invoices with procedural information, and accounting document number.

According to Andrus Kaarelson, various expert studies^{^[1]} have shown that automatic processing of e-invoices can save 60-80% of costs. The European Commission's e-invoicing expert group has estimated that the introduction of e-invoicing could save up to € 15 per invoice^{^[2]}. With an e-invoice, it is possible to pay faster, reduce human errors, and prevent fraud; in addition, companies hope that invoices will be paid faster. In Europe, the average payment period is around 30 days. If e-invoicing becomes prevalent throughout the European Union, the economic savings could be estimated at € 2.3 billion, according to the Real- time Economy Action Plan.

The State Shared Service Centre mediates the service to its 164 public sector clients, including 151 state agencies and 12 state foundations. Central ordering of the service to state agencies has enabled the state to obtain a lower price than if all agencies would have to procure the service themselves.

^{^[1]} https://www.billentis.com/index_e.htm page 66

^{^[2]} https://ec.europa.eu/growth/content/final-report-expert-group-e-invoicing_en page 78

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