Planning onboarding activities
Plan and resource your supplier onboarding for eInvoicing from the start. A well supported onboarding process leads to a smoother rollout and stronger supplier engagement.
Include in your onboarding plan:
- communicating with and encouraging suppliers to switch to sending eInvoices
- preparing for internal process changes, including staff training and communication
- providing clarity, confidence and certainty to staff around how their roles will change for the better
- providing clarity to suppliers around the content they need to provide in their invoices to ensure smooth processing, timely approval and payments.
Know your suppliers
Start by analysing your supplier master list as this will be key to identifying opportunities and guiding your short and longer-term selection of suppliers for onboarding. Look at:
- How many invoices does each supplier send, and how often?
- Which format do the suppliers use – paper, PDF, EDI?
- What types of purchasing arrangements or contracts do they have in place?
- Are they already set up to send eInvoices?
Know your business requirements and rules
Identify your internal accounts payable and procurement touchpoints with your suppliers.
Clearly define your business requirements for invoice processing and validation, and how they align with the mandatory and optional eInvoicing data elements. Sharing these with your suppliers will help them submit complete and accurate invoices, ensuring smooth processing on your end.
Know your eInvoicing service provider
Some eInvoicing service providers (or access points) offer assistance to their customers to onboard suppliers. This may include things like supplier communications, education, advice on eInvoicing solutions to help your supplier start eInvoicing you. This may reduce some of the effort required on your part to onboard your suppliers.
Reach out to your service provider to ask if they have a supplier onboarding service offering and how you could use their services.
Maximise your eInvoicing investment
Embedding eInvoicing as a natural part of daily business operations will help maximise the return on your investment. By aligning your invoicing channels, the more consistent and streamlined your processes will be.
Clearly communicate process changes to your staff. Explain that eInvoicing, especially when supported by automating accounts payable, helps reduce manual and repetitive tasks, allowing them to focus their time on more valuable work.
Manage the change
Moving suppliers to eInvoicing is more than a system upgrade – it’s a change to how invoices are exchanged and processed across the procure-to-pay cycle. It impacts tendering, contracts, invoice creation, processing, approval, payment, and reconciliation.
To ensure a smooth transition for both internal teams and suppliers, it's important to plan and resource the management of this change. This will help reduce friction, build trust and confidence in the new process and increase adoption.
Consider the following:
- Understand what's changing and identify practical steps to minimise disruption.
- Allocate staff to support onboarding. Consider forming a small change support team, assigning onboarding leads, leveraging senior executives' networks and influence, or even outsourcing onboarding to your service provider for an initial period.
- Create a change and communication plan to clearly outline what’s changing, how it will be implemented, and how it will be communicated to your teams and suppliers.
- Update relevant systems, processes, templates and instructions to reflect the new eInvoicing workflows, and ensure all who interact with these are informed and understand these changes.
- Notify suppliers well in advance with timelines and next steps. Use consistent messaging across multiple channels such as emails, webinars, direct outreach.
- Provide step by step guides, FAQs and self-service resources and direct support to help suppliers navigating the change.
- Suppliers adopt faster when they see clear benefits. Emphasise increased protection against invoice interception and fraud, faster payments, reduced admin, fewer disputes and alignment with government requirements and global standards.
- Not all suppliers are alike and a 'one size fits all' approach won't work. Group your suppliers by invoice volume, size or digital readiness and tailor your onboarding approach. Start with a pilot group to test and refine the process and use a phased approach for suppliers with constraints. Gather feedback to improve the process and onboarding experience for your suppliers and staff.
- Be sure to monitor your onboarding metrics such as adoption and exception rates, support requests, feedback, and follow up with suppliers who haven’t transitioned and offer tailored support.
- Share success stories and quick wins and be prompt in paying your early adopters. Showcase positive outcomes across internal and external channels to build momentum and credibility.
Identify an eInvoicing champion
While change can be met with resistance, when managed well it can also be an opportunity for innovation and improvements.
An eInvoicing champion, especially one with seniority in the organisation, can greatly enhance the effectiveness of the process by maintaining focus and visibility of the change and the reasons for it.
Staff training
Your internal teams are essential to a successful supplier onboarding experience and transition to eInvoicing in your organisation. Ensure staff are given the necessary time and information to understand and implement required changes.
A training module, referencing much of the content already available on this website, is under development.