on electronic invoicing in public procurement:
http://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?qid=1401623379226&uri=CELEX:32014L0055
On 16 April 2014, the European Parliament and the Council reached agreement on the Directive on e-invoicing in public procurement.
The Directive aims to facilitate the use of e-invoicing in Europe – and therefore contribute to its greater uptake – by removing market barriers resulting from insufficient interoperability between e-invoicing systems and setting out rules for the reception of e-invoices by the public sector. Specifically, the Directive calls for the development of a European standard for e-invoicing, and obliges all contracting authorities and contracting entities across the EU to receive and process e-invoices complying with the future standard.
Public entities which have implemented e-procurement report savings of between 5% and 20% of their procurement expenditure. Extrapolating 5% reductions to the total EU public expenditure for goods, works, and services would result in about €100 billion euro of savings per year.
With regard to e-invoicing, according to studies carried out by the Member States, the potential savings are several orders of magnitude larger than the implementation costs, and the initial investment can be amortised within a very short period of time (1 to 2 years maximum, in many cases even shorter).
Overall, the Commission estimates that implementation of e-invoicing in public procurement across the EU could generate savings of up to €2.3 billion a year.
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