The benefits for Canadian businesses to outsource e-invoicing to a managed service provider

Invoicing is one of an organization's business critical processes (BCP) functioning directly between two parties - a buyer and supplier. Over the last ten years organizations within the public and private sectors of the European Union (EU) and Latin & South America (S.America) identified the manual invoicing process as an opportunity to save money and increase productivity simply by outsourcing this function to a qualified Managed Service Provider (MSP) (Kivijärvi et al, 2012). By working together, governments in the EU created consortia focused on research and development with groups such as Research on Advanced Communications in Europe (RACE), which provided support to organizations who adopted new technologies like E-Invoicing (Rugman & Collison 2012). As a result, the European Association of Corporate Treasurers (EACT) claim that, since 2005, the measurable cost savings related to outsourcing processes, such as invoicing , has exceeded 243 billion euro per annum across Europe (Kivijärvi et al, 2012 UNECE 2012). Similar cost savings benefits will be appreciated by Canadian business upon implementation however, the adoption rate within Canada is still quite low as E-Invoicing industry is still in its infancy stages.