Approach to customer onboarding
Onboarding your customers is essential for you to quickly benefit from your eInvoicing investment. Remember, customers are the entities that buy your goods and services and that you send invoices to.
Consider the following in your onboarding plan:
- Don't leave onboarding until the end – consider a phased approach and start before your technical implementation is complete so you have testing and pilot partners ready.
- Set targets, influence your high-volume customers and look for quick wins that can help remove inefficiencies and build momentum towards eInvoicing becoming your default channel.
- Involve teams and get support from across your organisation – procurement, contract and account managers and other customer or client-facing areas who can promote eInvoicing at key engagement points during the contract management cycle.
Step 1: Understand your environment
Consider what you need to learn and understand about your environment to tailor your plan for success.
Your clients and customers
Analyse your clients and customers and identify the highest value opportunities for transitioning to eInvoicing.
Categorise using criteria such as:
- invoice volume, value or frequency
- eInvoicing capability or digital readiness
- those using less efficient or non-digital channels
- procurement arrangements such as requests for quote or tender responses, contract negotiations, supplier panels and standing offer arrangements.
If required, get help from your finance or procurement teams or run a short survey.
Check if your customers are already enabled to receive eInvoices using the Peppol Directory.
Your business
Determine your customers' touchpoints within your business.
Identify the channels and documents you use to communicate with your customers such as catalogues, email templates, contractual documents and websites. Update these as needed.
Understand your procurement regulatory and reporting requirements, including contract management practices, payment terms and other relevant policies and guidelines.
Document any business requirements and consider the data commonly 'Required for Interoperability' per the A-NZ industry practice statement on invoice contentExternal Link.
Your Peppol service provider (access point)
Some service providers offer customer (and supplier) onboarding as an optional extra. Research how they may be able to help your staff, and maybe your customers too.
Understand and document any integration, data or business requirements that you may need to include in customer communication and engagement, and staff education material.
Changes and impacts
Onboarding your customers and clients to eInvoicing needs to be managed as part of your eInvoicing system and process changes. Build customer-related actions into your change management and communications plans.
Identify customer dependencies and related business process changes and impacts. Consider the whole procure-to-pay process, including who is affected, and manage and mitigate any issues or risks.
Step 2: Group and prioritise
Use your customer analysis to identify customers to group and prioritise. Consider:
- quick-wins and opportunities to learn with customers already on the Peppol network
- longer-term but potentially greater benefits from high-volume larger customers
- customers with inefficient or problematic manual processes (for example, your non-digital 'long tail').
Step 3: Plan and resource
Outsourcing your onboarding will need to be factored into your business requirements and costings when selecting a Peppol service provider.
If onboarding will be done in-house:
- allocate someone to lead and focus on onboarding
- include onboarding in project, change management, engagement and communication plans
- phase your onboarding – define timeframes for prioritised customer groupings
- set targets for the first 6, 12 and 18 months (and beyond) and track the number of customers onboarded and the volume of eInvoices you send
- make onboarding customers and sending eInvoices part of your regular business activities.
Remember, the only way you and your customers will benefit from eInvoicing is by making sure as many of your customers are using it as possible. Build this into everything you do across your business to expedite a return on your investment of time, money and effort.
Step 4: Onboard
Implement your plan.
Engage and communicate
Collaborate, communicate and engage early.
Leverage existing sales, procurement, contract and account manager teams and relationships.
Identify customers who are already using eInvoicing and talk to them about your plans. And announce your plans to all customers to help them understand why, how they can benefit too, and what to expect and when.
Tailor engagement and communication for each customer group, using appropriate channels and highlight the shared benefits. Consider partnering with trusted influencers such as industry peak bodies to amplify your messages.
Be transparent about timeframes and key changes such as data or business requirements; tell them what it means for them. Let your customers know ato.gov.au/eInvoicing is where to find out more about eInvoicing and give them contact details for questions or support.
Customer communication templates
This email template may assist you communicating with customers about your desire to send them eInvoices. This same content may also be tweaked and published on your website to reflect your eInvoicing preferences.
Email: Announcing you can send eInvoices
Dear [Name]
We can send eInvoices
eInvoicing is rolling out across Australia. There are hundreds of thousands of businesses and government agencies registered on the eInvoicing network, with more joining every month.
Using eInvoicing reduces the risk of fraud and can improve efficiency. [Your business name/We] has/have switched on and now prefer to send eInvoices instead of emailing PDF invoices.
If you are already able to receive eInvoices we can start sending them to you now. To make sure the transition is smooth, please reply to this email noting any business rules or data requirements that we may not already be aware of.
If you are not yet able to receive eInvoices it can be easy and quick to get started - many software packages are already eInvoicing ready. Check the eInvoicing product registerExternal Link to see if your software is eInvoicing enabled.
If your software is not listed, ask your software provider if their product is ready and what you need to do to get enabled.
If you don't use any accounting software, there are many free or low-cost options.
The ATO has information to help small, medium and large businesses get started with eInvoicing.
We look forward to sending you eInvoices instead of emailing PDF invoices as soon as you're ready.
Regards,
[Your signature block]
Learn from early experiences
Pilot sending eInvoices to a small group of customers already able to receive. Some may have system limitations so be flexible. You may need to refine your own systems and processes to ensure interoperability before onboarding more business partners.
Encourage your customers to consider the A-NZ industry practice statement on invoice contentExternal Link (and make sure your approach also considered this guidance) to ensure a clear pathway to overcoming the most common interoperability challenges.
Ongoing procurement activities
Embed eInvoicing as a normal part of doing business; make it your default where possible. Build your eInvoicing preference into all renewed or new contracts and make it a regular component of doing business as usual.