Petr Marek, founder and CEO of Invoice Home, an invoice-generating platform designed for small businesses, freelancers and entrepreneurs.
In 2025, the e-invoicing mandate will take effect in Europe. While this is not the case for the U.S. (yet)—and while I think the government can provide benefits to small businesses in the U.S.—I don’t believe a mandate for e-invoicing would be beneficial overall.
That being said, the argument for moving toward digitizing business paperwork, including invoicing, remains strong. I found a recent article in PYMNTS compelling in its reasons for why companies should move toward digital business practices like e-invoicing: “But the move toward e-invoicing is not merely about converting a paper invoice into a digital format; it’s about reimagining the entire B2B invoicing process to be more streamlined and better integrated into digital business ecosystems.”
Below, I will share a bit more about why and how small businesses can reimagine their invoicing process to be more streamlined and better integrated into digital business ecosystems overall. There doesn’t need to be a government mandate to approach your invoicing process with maximum efficiency in 2025.
How can digital invoicing tools help businesses?
• Efficiency: Automating and digitizing business tasks like invoicing is typically an effective way to save time and money. By including direct payment links in invoices, you can also encourage faster payment processing, which I’ve found can not only increase productivity but also help ensure account money is available.
• Visibility: Digital tools can provide instant visibility into the status of accounts, allowing you to pinpoint who has a history of on-time payments and which accounts tend to wait until the 60- or 90-day payment mark.
• Security: Digital tools can also provide businesses with enhanced security and fraud protection. With the rise in payment scams—including fake invoicing—it’s important to protect your business from potential bad actors.
While you can’t digitize every aspect of your business, these are just a few examples of areas that can benefit from digital tools and make the investment worthwhile.
How can you begin making your invoicing more efficient?
Modernization is often important for small businesses to stay competitive against larger corporations. Fortunately, small businesses have access to more tools than ever to simplify invoicing and other business paperwork, allowing business owners to maintain even more accurate and organized records and simplify tracking of income, expenses and payment transactions.
Here are a few things to keep in mind when digitizing your business processes:
• Payment Integration: Provide customers with multiple ways to pay to help ensure that invoices are paid on time. In my experience working with companies to more efficiently generate invoices, integrating with payment platforms like Stripe or Apple Pay/Google Wallet can facilitate quicker payments (especially compared to a paper check method, for example).
• Mobile-Friendly Solutions: Rather than only offering basic online payment options, make your invoices available on the go so you can send invoices and receive payments quickly from anywhere. This can be especially helpful if you have remote teams or work in industries like construction, freelancing, consulting, etc., where you are frequently on-site or in the field.
• Invoicing Software: When selecting invoicing software, I recommend looking for one that has a good reputation for effectively reducing time spent on data entry and speeding up the invoicing process. An effective invoicing tool should automate specific tasks that can be digitized, allowing you to focus on the parts of your business that require your time and attention (and that can’t be digitized, like customer service interactions).
If you are interested in moving toward digitizing your business processes and paperwork, start small and find ways to slowly migrate to digital methods, as this can simplify the process. A great first step is to evaluate which tasks are taking the most time to complete. From there, you can assess smart, cost-effective options to find one that fits your needs. Once you’ve found the right tool or tools, consider how you can best implement them to quickly start realizing the advantages and cost-savings they can provide.
Should the U.S. move toward e-invoicing mandates?
While digitizing business paperwork has its advantages, and I would certainly encourage small businesses to move toward a digital invoicing solution, I believe that imposing a requirement that invoicing be completely digital could hurt smaller family businesses or individual proprietors. That being said, businesses should consider implementing e-invoicing and other digital tools in 2025 to help ensure their business keeps up with the competition.
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