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OK, I think we'll get started now. Kia ora koutou.

Thank you for joining me today to learn about eInvoicing, how it can help you reduce admin, improve accuracy and security, and improve your cash flow. My name is Linda More. I'm part of the eInvoicing team here at the Ministry of Business Innovation and employment. Also joining me today is Andrew Cooke and Alison Smith.
While this session is about getting you up to speed on what eInvoicing is and isn't the benefits for you and your business, it's also a very practical session for those that use Xero or MYOB.

So my suggestion is it might be handy for you to be logged into your Xero or MYOB account during this session so that you can follow along. Now we know from the registrations for this webinar that there may be some of you here today that don't use MYOB or Xero, but it's likely that some of your trading partners use these platforms, so I think it will be useful for you to understand what their experience is when you ask them to send you eInvoices or for you to send them eInvoices. So it's good to just upskill your own knowledge on how those platforms work. And just really how easy it is.

Please note this session will be recorded and will be available on our website in the next couple of weeks. We'll send you an e-mail letting you know when it's available. Also note that we will send out a copy of this presentation in the next couple of days as there are many links to resources and things that will be handy for you. There will be time for questions and answers towards the end of the session. Please use the Q&A function, not the chat function. So Andrew may enter answers to some of these questions during the session, so look out for them. if we don't answer them in the live session. All right, please join me for the MBIE Karakia if you wish.

All right, Alison is gonna put a link in the chat that will take you to a poll, and we'd love you to please answer three quick questions in this poll. So grab the link out of the chat. And I'm gonna hand it over to Andrew, who's gonna share his screen and show go through what those questions are.

Thank you very much, Linda. So coming up on screen now, some of you have already started. Our expectation is most of you will be on Xero with a smattering of MYOB and a bunch of other of course a lot of Linda's presentation towards the end of this webinar will be focusing on Xero and MYOB as well.

I'll just pause as we let you go through those. It's quite interesting. And of course, eInvoicing is free to use today in both Xero and MYOB. It's got another 20 seconds or so. So that's good. We've got 253 of you logged into the webinar now and just over 200 of you have responded now. I'm going to move on to the next question.

Have you already registered to receive eInvoices? Good to see that a number of you have already registered, and those of you that haven't, well, I encourage you to do so after this webinar.

Yeah, you'll get to see how easy it is to do.

Well, I'll move on to the last question.
Good.

Some of the content of this webinar is very relevant for those of you who supply to government, so stay tuned to learn more.

Okie dokie. I think we will stop the poll now and move on to the core content of this presentation. So yeah.

Right.
Very good.
Hopefully that has, uh, popped up.
And.

Now hold up a moment. We've got Alison with her hand up, Linda and.

Oh.
OK, Alison, what's up?

You're on mute, Alison.

Apologies for that, that's a mistake.

OK.

Just gonna.
Let's do something here. We'll just make sure the sound is on because they're.
OK.
All right, here we go. If you're in Business Today, you'll want to know about eInvoicing. It's a digital offering that brings a smart approach to invoicing, so manual handling can become a thing of the past.
Let's set a few things straight. eInvoicing means no paper.
No PDFs.
No scanning and no e-mail. It's an exchange of invoice information directly between suppliers and buyers financial systems. Even if these systems are different, it improves accuracy and security.
Reduces processing time and speeds up payments. Great news for cash flow. To get started, talk to your accounting or financial software provider about their plans to provide eInvoicing enabled services. Find out more at einvoicing.govt.nz.
eInvoicing the smarter way of invoicing.

Thank you for that, Linda. Now that you've seen that video, you'll realize that Invoicing is not emailing a PDF to customers. To recap, Invoices go directly between suppliers and buyers systems, even if their systems are different, by using a global network standard called PEPPOL
This is a a commonly agreed standard across New Zealand and globally, and that's quite prolific in APAC countries as well. This is 1 network for all businesses. For example, large suppliers often use their own invoicing solutions and that puts a burden on SMEs who have to log into a portal to send their invoices.
eInvoicing levels the playing field. With current invoice processes, we're largely inefficient with delivery areas because of post and e-mail processing areas because of systems and other manual workarounds, payment delays due to manual processes.
Lack of security and increased likelihood of invoice fraud scams, lost invoices and chasing up payment progress. All of this changes with eInvoicing. So when you're talking to your trading partners, you may have to dispel them of this myth when you ask them to send you eInvoices instead of PDFs.
Or when you ask if you can send eInvoices instead of PDFs. Next slide please, Linda.
So we've just drawn out some of the key benefits for SMEs. We think there are some great benefits for businesses, and recent research does confirm this because eInvoices go from one system to another, but never get lost or stuck in someone's inbox. And do you know that roughly 70% of emails?
Are successfully delivered, so roughly 30% don't make it through or unopened for one reason or another. eInvoices are always in your accounting system with no manual data entry or copying and pasting. There's complete information and that makes coding easier. Also, your accountant or bookkeeper will love you when it comes to the end of financial year preparations.
And all of this means a smoother process for your customer receiving your eInvoices speed up the process, which means they're probably able to pay you faster, which helps improve your cash flow. Next slide, please.
And to some other key benefits for SMEs, when you're receiving and when you're receiving einvoices into your system, it's primarily around administration burden. By reducing that, you get more time back in your day, no more manual entry of invoice data.
Many of you may not have experienced invoice fraud and you think it won't happen to you, but it does happen. Unfortunately, cybercrime is a growth industry. But with eInvoicing, the risk of intercepted emails and PDF invoices being tampered with reduces considerably because an eInvoice can't be intercepted or tampered with.
Now we're going to show you a nice little video from a real small business who has experience eInvoicing for themselves. Over to you, Linda.

Let me just.

Yeah.

Normally we have coaching clients and we invoice them for a package of coaching, generate an invoice on Xero, send it to them as a PDF and it goes off to their finance department and we wait until they run all their invoices at once. That can be weeks. So as a small business you can go uh.
But what eInvoicing does means that we just get given an NZBN number and we put the number on our invoice in zero and it just goes match gets approved really quickly and we can get paid within days. With eInvoicing it's just.
So simple, yeah. Our business admin here has got a lot faster because I have to do it, so I'm grateful. How it's changed is that once I get the NZBN number of the organization I'm sending it to, that can be the trickiest, but then we're off, never have to say to them again.
Oh, what's happened to that invoice? Because it's just gone to a number. And then through the magic of eInvoicing, all the numbers get matched up with what the work is for and it gets paid. So it preserves our coaching relationship and keeps it trusted, strong and confidential and positive.
So how I found out about it was when I was asked if I wanted to be.
Part of that.

Thank you very much, Linda. Right now, just moving just very briefly onto the next slide. So why is the government and MBIE behind this? So savings to our economy are conservatively estimated to be well over $4 billion a year, well over 10 years.
Increasing the speed of payments and moving money around the economy faster  means we will all be better off. It's about doing the right thing for the New Zealand economy.
OK, next slide.
Now things are going pretty well in the eInvoicing space. There are currently about 52,000 businesses registered to receive eInvoices and this is set to increase over the following months. Now most of these organisations are SMEs like yourselves who are using eInvoicing capable software such as Xero, MYOB or Reckon One.
This means users of these products can send and receive eInvoices free of charge today. There are about 60 enabled software products and growing. These software products are listed on our eInvoicing software products page and I think Alison's about to paste a link to that into the chat.
Many large businesses are sending eInvoices to their SME customers and are implementing the technology so they can too. For example, Bunnings have been sending eInvoices to their customers for almost a year now. There's a whole raft of other organizations, most of which are suppliers to government, who are also sending, including
OfficeMax, Datacom, NXP, One New Zealand and Farm Source, which is a subsidiary of Fonterra, along with Robert Walters and a whole raft of others. They're just some of the big names. We're aware of a bunch of other high volume senders who are all set to join as the year progresses.
Now about 60 government agencies are currently capable of sending or receiving eInvoices, and many more are set to follow in the coming months. You may also have heard that government recently announced that  the government agencies must ensure their large suppliers begin sending eInvoices to them from January 27.
So government really leading the way in this space. This is a successful formula used by some European countries and we're just following suit. So while it's still early days, the PEPPOL eIvoicing network has grown sustainably and consistently.
Next slide please. Now a little bit about the government procurement rules. As the previous slide noted that over 100 government agencies who are required to send or receive eInvoices, they must also pay einvoices within five business days.
So late last year it was announced that agencies must ensure large suppliers send eInvoices to government and suppliers to pay subcontractors and government contracts on terms no less favourable terms than those they receive from government. These new rules are aimed to improve payment times to small businesses and ramp up eInvoicing adoption.
That will help ensure that government leads by example in supporting improved cash flow and fairer payment practices for suppliers and their subcontractors. These large businesses will also want to send eInvoices to their other business customers, and these are likely going to be yourselves, not just government.
They provide further confidence for businesses to adopt eInvoicing and realise the benefits already being experienced by many New Zealand organisations. Meanwhile, there's a bit of activity last year, Minister Watts, who's one of his portfolios is local government.
He recently set an expectation for councils to adopt eInvoicing. We've already seen a lot of momentum with local government, with quite a few already enabled and many more set to follow. And some of you may be here today from councils as we received a number of registrations from local government. So welcome.
What all of this means is many of your trading partners across private and government are in are eIvoicing now or shortly will be eInvoicing. Now I'm going to shortly hand the reins over to Linda and she's going to be covering some of the practical aspects of sending and receiving eInvoices through MYOB and Xero.
So I'm going to go to the Q&A now. Please fire through your questions and I'll answer as many of them as I can in writing. And then at the end of the webinar, we'll go through what's left and discuss them orally. Over to you, Linda.

Thank you. Thank you, Andrew. So yes, we get, I think I might have skipped a slide there. Yes, I did. So we know many of you use Xero or MYOB, so we're gonna start with Xero. And one of the things it's really important to make sure that your organisation settings has your own NZBN
Number in there. So even if you don't register to receive to be able to send invoices, you need to make sure you've got your NZBN number in that. So please make sure you check your organisation's settings. Within Xero you can go to the settings,
organisation details and as you can see at the bottom there, there's a section for the NZ, the New Zealand business number, NZBN. So just make sure that is updated in order before you get cracking.
So we're going to move on to how to register to receive eInvoices within the Xero platform. So many of you have indicated that you have. Fantastic, that's great. But there were many of you on the call that said you hadn't registered. So if you're using Xero, maybe you could follow along and do that.
As we do it, Alison is going to put a link in the chat that would take you to help in the Xero's website if you need to have a look at that later on, but it's really easy to get registered. You just go to the the bills to pay section and at the top right.
There's a setup eInvoicing button. You click on that, you verify your business details by entering your NZBN number. It might pop up automatically if you've got it in your organisation settings and you've just confirmed those details are correct.
Add a representative for your business, agree to the terms and conditions and complete the registration. So really easy. Will just take you a minute or two to register.
And similarly for those that use the MYOB platform, again you just go into the settings, sales settings, choose eInvoicing and get started. And again you just complete your business details including your NZBN.
Acknowledge the terms and conditions and you've registered for eInvoicing. Just noting that with MYOB, when you're registering to receive, you're also registering to send through their platform.
So again, just a couple of minutes to get set up and off you go. Really easy to do. So something you can do either right now as we're speaking, or it's something you can do straight after this webinar.
Now when you're preparing to send eInvoices, there is a little bit of admin you need to make sure you have in place. Not sure how good your customer records are, but please update them to ensure it contains the customer's NZBN number.
So that's the unique identifier to make sure it reaches the right person. So the video says eInvoices go from one system to another. How does it know to get to the right place? It's using the NZBN number of the person who's receiving it.
So that's what ensures that eInvoices get to the right place. So you need to make sure that your customer records are up to date. You're wondering how do I find out what my customer's NZBN number is? Well, you can ask them, but you can also check use the
NZBN.govt.nz website. They've got a search function where you can enter the business name in there and it'll pop up with the details of their NZBN number. Alternatively, if you've got a lot of trading partners and you don't want to do that one by one.
They do have a business match service. Again, I think Alison has put that in the chat function and you can link to that. Basically it says, hey, provide us with a spreadsheet with the names of all your trading partners. e-mail that off to us.
Off to the NZBN team, they will look at the directory, find the NZBN number, add that back onto your spreadsheet and send it back to you. So that's a quick way of getting all your trading partners if you have many of them.
Just a little bit of a watch out. Here's an example where we've searched for Wellington City Council and as you can see these four options that have come up there and on the right hand side it tells you whether they're registered or if they've been removed.
And some businesses have really similar names and so you're not sure which one it should be. I suggest that you check with your trading partner to make sure you have the right NZBN number. So just a watch out there.
Because you do want to make sure that the invoices get to the right place. All right, so again, you've got your customer contact record updated, but you don't know if your customer has actually registered to receive eInvoices.
First of all, you can check the list of registered businesses. We publish this 51,000 odd, about 52,000 now on our invoicing website. You can locate the link to that spreadsheet on the homepage.
And we update that every month, so you can get that there. All right. So let's get into the practicalities of sending an eInvoice from Xero. So the customer's NZBN number is entered in the contact record. Make sure that's there.
And you've checked to see whether the customer is registered to receive. You would complete an invoice just like you would normally would through Xero, but you'll notice down the bottom here in the bottom right of your Xero account, you'll see a little toggle there that.
It says send as an eInvoice and conveniently Xero have added a little thing to say that this contact is set up to receive eInvoices. So even if you don't know if your customer can receive eInvoices, this will tell you.
So you just move that toggle along. You've completed your invoice as normal. Change the toggle so that you can send it as an eInvoice and then you approve and send. So really straightforward, easy as.
Just a watch out. Many government agencies and large businesses ask you to put a reference on the invoice, so it could be a buyer's reference or purchase order or contract number. So in Xero this is where you would put it.
To be able to distinguish it between just a normal buyer's reference and a purchase order, you need to prefix that with the PO colon and then you would add in the purchase order number that your customer has given you in the format that they want you to put it in.
Some might have PO123, in this instance it's PN123456 so just a watch out there. That's where you will put that information if your buyer is asking you for reference numbers to be added to the invoice.
Now on MYOB, again very similar. You would create an invoice as normal, just making sure that you do include something in the description field. If that's empty, it won't be sent as an eInvoice, so it needs to contain some information.
And then in the top right there, that's where you will put a customer purchase order number if that's required.
So when you've completed your invoice and you want to send it, then you go to the "share" at the top right hand side of your MYOB screen and there's in the drop down there's a send eInvoice as an option.
So it'll pop up where you'll need to check the summary of the the eInvoice and also noting that a PDF version will also automatically attach when you send the eInvoice. So just noting that yes, we're saying eInvoicing is not PDFs, but you can send a
A PDF of an invoice through the eInvoicing network along with the eInvoice that has the data that is passed along to the other person's system. So that's just something to be aware of and as you can see, really easy to send
And the invoices through MYOB.
Now receiving eInvoices. So you've registered to receive eInvoices already, and in the chat there's a couple of links that will just give you some more information and advice from from Xero and from MYOB.
But one thing I want to point out is that eInvoices also meet IRD's record keeping requirements for taxable supplies. So we do get asked this question from time to time. Is this all kosher with IRD? You know, is this going to be OK? Don't they want to see PDFs?
No, they are very OK with eInvoices meeting their tax, their record keeping requirements. So again in the chat Alison would have put a link to IRD's website that has that taxable supply information for GST
And it talks about how that works for eInvoicing. So just be reassured there now within Xero. So somebody sent you an eInvoice, it automatically appears as a draft bill.
So that's where you will find it and you will approve and schedule the payment as usual. Within MYOB, it appears in the upload section. You'll click on the three dots for the eInvoice and you can decide whether to create a bill from the invoice, download it or reject it.
And just want to reassure everyone is although an eInvoice automatically appears in your Xero or MYOB account, you still have to approve and schedule the payment as usual. So that doesn't automatically happen, which is very important because you want to have control over.
That process, so really just to want to reassure you there.
Now the more businesses are sending, receiving eInvoices, the more you all benefit from eInvoicing. So at the beginning of the session we talked about reduced admin time savings, potential to get paid faster.
So the more that you do eInvoicing, the greater the benefits for you. Now, one way to get started with receiving eInvoices is if you're a Xero user, you can change your Billings preferences to receive your Xero subscription bill as eInvoices. And on the screen here you can see.
That there are a couple of options of how you can opt into that. One option is when you receive your online subscription invoice, you just scroll on down to the options section at the bottom of that and choose to receive as an eInvoice. You'll be asked to enter the NZBN.
You register and submit and it's as easy as that. Alternatively, if you don't want to wait for your next online subscription invoice to to arrive, you can go into the organisation name, navigate through to editing your billing contact and you can choose to receive.
Xero subscriptions as eInvoices and you can confirm there. So that's a good way to just tip, dip your toes into eInvoicing as a way to start receiving them.
Excuse me. So it's really important. Hey, let your your trading partners know. How do they know if you can send or receive eInvoices if you don't let them know? We've got this really handy little eInvoicing capable image that you can download from our website and add that
into your e-mail signature and just put some words in there about, hey, we prefer to receive eInvoices. Here's our NZBN number or we prefer to send. Please let us know what your NZBN number is. So communication is key.
All right, we're nearing the end of our session and we will get into questions in a tick. But just a checklist when you get off this webinar, go and register to receive einvoices. Go and opt in to receive your Xero subscription bill as an einvoice. You can check the list of those businesses that are registered to
receive and see if you can find your trading partners that you can start exchanging eInvoices with. Set aside some time to ensure that you've updated your customer records to have their NZBNS. Start sending eInvoices and we just want you to encourage others to send you eInvoices.
Now we're going to get into the questions. If we run out of time and we don't answer your question, please feel free to e-mail us at eInvoicing@mbie.govt.nz. Now on the next slide, we do have a whole bunch of resources. I'm not going to go through them now
but these will be available. We send out the pack and you can go and browse at your leisure. All right, I'm going to end the slideshow here and we are going to get into the questions.

Thank you, telling me.

Andrew, have we got a start for 10?

We do. I've got, I've got a good, got a simple one and then a really technical one. So I have already answered a lot of questions, but Bao Her asks what about suppliers who do not have an NZBN? So you require an NZBN to receive an eInvoice, but, Lise, I might need to get you to jump in here
So you currently need an NZBN to receive an eInvoice, but you don't need one to send an eInvoice. That's correct, isn't it?

No, you need an NZBN on both ends.

Both ends, yeah, uh, so there you go.

Yeah, so you need you need to be an NZBN is like it's like the addresses that you put on an envelope. So the sending NZBN is the sender address that you might write on the back of the envelope and the
the receiving NZBN is the address on the front of the envelope, so but but there's there's just a bit of confusion there because it's businesses have to be registered to receive eInvoices and that's basically so that
if you're sending them an eInvoice, your system can look up the directory and work out whether they're actually registered to receive an invoice and find out who they are before they actually try to send it. Otherwise it would just go into oblivion.

Thanks, Lise. I'm going to try and answer the next question from Paul Wiggins, who essentially says that they're on a platform which is not MYOB and Xero called Microsoft Business Central, which is the easiest way for to become enabled via eInvoicing.

That makes sense.

Via Continia, which is I think their AP plugin and he's asking about about the cost and are there any mechanisms to avoid these additional transaction costs as adoption grows. The reality is for a lot of businesses, especially the larger businesses, there is a cost to eInvoicing.
To implement it in your system. We'll be covering off all of that detail in some of our upcoming webinars. I won't go into detail now, but I do encourage you Paul to attend one of those webinars. But at the end of the day, when there is an investment, there needs to be a return on that investment and over time
eInvoicing is only going to grow and so the investment in eInvoicing will become more and more will have a better net present value overtime.
Right
Linda, now Linda looks like she's locked up on us, so I might take the next mention, the next question. So from Sabina G, as you mentioned, eInvoicing is good for Xero and MYOB software. Is there any way it can be used with other ERP systems such as Epicor?
Lise, would you like, would you mind talking about some implementation pathways just ever so briefly outside of MYOB and Xero?

Sorry, I was on mute there for a moment. Um, there are lots of other systems, ERP systems, that are enabled for eInvoicing as well. And off the top of my head, I'd have to double go and check, um, whether Epicor is one that is also enabled.
We do have a list on our website um of all of the eInvoicing capable software that is um out there. If Epicor isn't or another ERP system isn't, then um we have service providers that
you could contact. They're also listed on our webpage who can actually make make your invoices created in your software go through as eInvoices to your customers.
So they basically they enable you to use the PEPPOL network by adding some functionality in in the middle between you and your customer or you and your supplier.
But we will talk about more, more about that in the in the Receive webinar that we're going to be running next Wednesday, yeah.

Yeah, yeah, thanks.

You'll get to hear hear me talking for half an hour next time.

Cool. So George Smith has asked some departments in MBIE don't issue PO's like with the regional tourism boost funding. Are they going to need to change that? Uh, not necessarily. Um.
Is the answer. I know that um some organisations and MBIEs one of them is sometimes they issue a purchase order and sometimes they don't. So it is something that you'll need to ask your contact within that organisation to see what kind of reference, a buyer's reference, which could be a cost centre instead of a purchase order that you
need to add in.  Now specific to regional tourism boost funding. I'm unsure about the process for an Um invoices with them. They may be one of the out of scope options for eInvoicing, so I can't answer that right now.

May I just jump in and add a bit more to that answer?

Yep.

So yeah, so MBIE isn't people at MBIE aren't bound to create purchase orders for everything. We're working on a project, we have been for quite some time to re-educate the business to a mostly purchase order way of doing things.
But there's no concern about if you send us an invoice and an eInvoice and it doesn't have a purchase order on it, we can, we will still receive that that eInvoice. It just arrives into a pool where our procure to pay team or our accounts payable team actually
go through and manually pass those invoices through to the people that need to approve them. The purchase order is from an eInvoicing perspective is probably the best scenario because actually if
you're providing us with a purchase order number that matches in our system and the person who placed that purchase order has goods receipted it, then that enables our system to actually do an auto match function and bring it right through and it will just come straight through and land on
the account ready for payment. So it's just that that is the ideal way of doing things, but it doesn't mean that you you're not going to get the invoices through if they don't have purchase orders on them, excuse me.

Thanks, Lise. The next question is from Joe McLean. Will, eInvoices received learn how you would usually code them from each supplier. Now I'm assuming Joe, that you might be on Xero. So I I'm a Xero user myself and when
I receive an invoice which I've previously processed, it remembers what I did last time. So eInvoicing is just another channel and I'd expect same the same functionality will work. Oh answered in session, good.
Linda, over to you for the next question from Claire Martin.

I've lost my place. Oh, no, no, it's all right. It's all right. What about international customers? Um, yes. So um, as Andrew might have mentioned throughout the session that um.

OK. Um, so Claire Martin was last.

PEPPOL eInvoicing is a global standard that is used, so you would need to check with your international customer whether they are registered to receive on the PEPPOL eInvoicing network and they will have
an equivalent of a NZBN, so a unique identifier. So you would need to get that from them. And yes, it is possible to be able to send eInvoices to international customers.
Does Lise.....do you want to add to that?

Yeah, yeah. So, um, so Australia and New Zealand, uh adopted an updated PEPPOL standard, a couple of years ago now, which allows um basically seamless international trade with eInvoices. And so and we um sit pretty closely
with the Australian PEPPOL Authority, we share the same spec and the rest of the world is currently rolling out that specification to allow international trade. So the real, the only real difference with
sending an international invoice is what identifying number that you store. So for New Zealand it's NZBN, New Zealand business number, for Australia it's the ABN which is you know their tax number and and generally across the rest of the world it is their their VAT or their tax number.
So as long as you have that stored, the invoice as it passes through from your sending finance system to their receiving system, it should go through in the same way, presuming that the currency is set at the at Australian Dollars or British Pounds or whatever it might be.

Thank you, Lise. So the next question is from Tony. ACC required PO number and claim number on invoices and often client name. How do you provide all this information on a Xero invoice?
I'm going to have a crack at this but team feel free to chip in. So I would use the reference field for the purchase order number and so remembering you would prefix that with the PO colon and then the number that ACC have given you.
And I would suggest putting the claim number and the client name in the description field. Yeah, Lise is nodding to that, so that would be the best place. I wouldn't.... It's highly likely to cause issues with ACC if you try to put all of that information into the reference field.
So just the purchase order number in that reference part of the invoice.

Yeah, and without getting too technical, the Xero reference field on the face of it only appears to support one reference at a time. So if you were sending an invoice to ACC
you would think that you can only put one reference in there, but as Linda was saying, you can, to an extent, define what information goes where. So yeah, as Linda said, if you have PO colon and then the order number after that then
Xero will actually pick up that value and map it into the purchase order field so that it arrives with ACC in the purchase order field. If you don't put a prefix in there, you.... it will..... All of the information will go to the buyer reference, so it will still arrive
but anything, anything other than with a prefix like the PO or there might be a contract number or a project number or a tender number. They're the other reference fields that PEPPOL supports if you put the correct prefix in front of those and
And there is a certain order in the way you do it so that the so that it all maps through properly. And feel free to reach out to me later if you want to talk about that in more detail. Yes, you can. You can support those references
but it's always worth speaking with ACC directly just to double check what the best way to send that information is for them.

Cool, thanks, Lise. Right. The next question is from Nicola Edwards and she's essentially, she says we have many small turnover customers using Xero who are eInvoice enabled. We're not seeing any benefits in that they're not paying faster. We still have to follow up numerous times. Do you have any advice in regards to this? So.
eInvoicing is just another channel and what it means is eInvoices, so invoices are more likely to arrive in the the customer's finance system. And generally speaking, in our experience, it shaves off about two days of processing time to get into the system, but there's a lot of dependencies there.
But when it comes to the behaviour of actually paying Invoices and payment terms, eInvoicing does not solve those problems. The government has had some initiatives over the years. There was a recent Act called the Business Payment Practices Act, which was repealed recently that required large businesses to pay their invoices promptly.
As that's being repealed, there's currently no formal mechanism to require businesses to pay their invoices promptly, I'm afraid.

And I'm presuming those small turnover customers aren't government agencies?

Probably just one other thing to note here as well is one of the things that Xero users need to get into the habit of is actually logging into their account if they don't do that

Probably not, no.

Um, often they might need to do that more often to check their draft bills to see if they've got eInvoices in there. So that's a little bit of a behaviour change in terms of, you know, previously they would have got it in their inbox and they might have seen it because it's going straight into their system. They may be overlooking it because they
haven't actually logged into their, um, their Xero account. So I would just, you know, remind them that you're sending eInvoices and it'll be straight in their system. So um, yeah, but as Andrew said in terms of their own processes for paying and timeframes that
It still sits with them.

Now we have reached the end of the webinar, but I would like us to continue going through the questions. So please stick around and I think we'll move on to the next question. And I think, Lise, you might be best placed. So there's a question from Candice Steyn-Ross.
She asks, are all versions of Xero eInvoice enabled? Do you need the most current version of Xero to use eInvoicing?

Um.
I would say yes, all versions of Xero are eInvoicing enabled. Um, my understanding is that they update it automatically. So I'm not quite... when you say versions, um, are you meaning older versions versus newer versions or are you

Mm.

meaning smaller versions like Ignite as opposed to more functionality rich version.

Yeah, I think it may be a general rule of thumb lease is that if you have invoicing function now within zero, then you're highly likely to have eInvoicing function there. So if if you've.

Hmm.
Yeah, I've I've not heard of any versions that don't have, um, eInvoicing enablement.

Yeah, yeah.

OK.
Right, the next one is from Anne Marie. We use Sage Interact. Do you have info for this package as you talk about MYOB and Xero? So Sage Interact is an enabled software product, but it's not one where we have produced guidance material.
I would talk to your account manager and ask if they have any material that they can share with you. But a lot of what Linda has shared is fairly generic across eInvoicing solutions.
Lise, anything further to add? Are you familiar with Sage?

They might also have, um, their website might have information about how to do it as well, so I'd check their website.

Um.
Mm.
No, I think Andrew and Linda have covered that well. Thank you.

All right, the next question.
I generate invoices using a time management system that then feeds the invoice to Xero for accounting purposes. Once I've accepted that invoice into Xero, can I then send it as an eInvoice or would I need to work out how to do it from the source system?

Would you like me to answer that?

I think I will let you answer that.

OK. And so it does depend on what your your time management system is, but on the face of it, yes, I would say once the invoice is accepted into Xero, then you can send it as an eInvoice. This is a slight little trick.
That if if you accept that invoice into Xero and then you choose to send it as a PDF first, then you don't have an option after that to send
as an eInvoice, so you have to make sure that you send as an eInvoice first.
But yes, that can be done.

Mm.

But also find out. I recommend finding out from your time management software company whether they support eInvoicing as well.
Oh.

Cool. Holly has asked, can I please get a link to the to register for the webinar mentioned for next week? Holly, I hope you're still on the call. I've put the link to our website that lists all our webinars that are on in February so you can register from there.

Right. Tracy Fletcher asks, when receiving an eIinvoice, will we have the option to download a PDF from that before it was approved in Xero? This would just be for internal approvals. So I know it's very much the case of sending. I actually don't know about receiving.
Lise?

Um, I'm just reading it. Sorry, so.

So, while Lise is reading that. So here at MBIE our solution which is Technology One renders a PDF version of any invoice and so essentially from our system it has that solution. I'm just not sure Xero does. I'd be surprised if it didn't.

Yeah, they all come in as, um, draft bills, don't they?

Yes, yes, they do come down, come. They do appear in your Xero account as a draft bill, so um.

Yeah. And so you've always, at whatever stage, you've always got access to a PDF render of that invoice.

Yeah.
Yeah.

Whether it's before or after approval.

OK.

Great questions.

Um, somebody has their hand up.

Hmm, Linda, did you want to ask a question?
No?

We've allowed the mic if you want to unmute and ask a question.

Hi.

OK. Right, should we move on to the question from Michelle James?

No.
Zero PO's use PO-XXX. Do we need to type PO colon PO dash, dash, dash? That's correct. So um.

I'm just adding a comment to just to make it a bit more clear.

Yeah, yeah. As I mentioned in our session that unfortunately or fortunately, I don't know, but a lot of organisations all have different formats for their purchase order numbers. So MBIE for example has PN123456.
Other organisations just might have some numbers, or they might have a mixture of letters and numbers, or they might have PO123. So you need to check what the format is from your buyer as of that purchase order number, remembering to put PO colon and then
the format and the number of what the buyer has given you.
Hopefully that answers your question.

Right. Next question from George Smith, will eInvoicing potentially push more work to the finance team and the wider business to work out what cost costing is etcetera relates to at the end of the day, any issues you're having with your current manual PDF processes?
You know, can potentially be transferred across by eInvoicing in terms of coding issues, it's just so important to share with your with your customers, you know the requirements, but I mean
as mentioned early on in this presentation, eInvoicing, it's a structured transmission and receipt of data and and so that means that a lot of productivity gains actually with the finance teams. However, sometimes there's a little bit of pain early on.
As as as businesses come to grips with where to put the the reference information, but by and large it saves finance teams time. It doesn't cost finance teams time.

Yeah, I mean and and Andrew points out an important thing is that your customer, they need to ensure that they pass on any cost centre or buyer reference or purchase order numbers. They need to pass that on to you to for you to then put that on the
invoice before you, the eInvoice before you send it. Um. And so you know if if a PDF was sent through and it didn't have that that those references on them, somebody has to pick that up and and add that. So um, I guess.
You're right in some ways is is that the finance team are going, oh, there's no, there's no coding on here, there's no, um, cost centre or anything on here. I've got to go back to the business to find out what that is. And so the business needs to play ball and make sure they're passing on that information
to their suppliers.
Hope that makes sense.
We've got about 5 minutes left. How are we going?

What?
There you go. I've got a few more questions. Um.
Right, Olivia Sanford, when getting the invoice straight into Xero, where would the backup copy be if we don't print, if we don't have an e-mail or save to HubDoc? What happens if we leave Xero later on but still need the copy for seven years? I don't know the answer to that, I'm afraid.

Um.
Um, I guess it's like any of your record keeping. If you change, um, if you change accounting systems and things, you still need to put something in place to keep all the records of that accounting system. So not just invoice information, but other information. So um.
You would need to work out a process for that, and I don't know what that process would be. I'm sorry.

Yeah, generally when you do, yeah, sorry. Yeah, generally when you do move from one accounting system to another, in my experience, you have to basically hold on if you own, even if you have only view only access to that
old system. You tend to have a basic version of it running in the background so that you can go back and check those old records should you need to. There's no easy way around it, sadly.

Right. Anna Clark is asking if Datacom is capable. Yes, they are capable of sending and receiving eInvoices and one of their products, Datascape, which is used widely across local government, it's not yet enabled, but we're working with them and
we're hopeful it will just be a matter of time.

I guess the short answer is they, um, Datacom is sending eInvoices and can receive.

Oh.
Yeah, yeah.

Can you include? Chrissy has asked. Can you include a PDF with your eIinvoice? Both Xero and MYOB have the option to attach a PDF include attachments of PDFs. That PDF could be a time sheet. It doesn't necessarily have to be a PDF of the
invoice, but there is that option.

I've got two more questions and I think we'll probably wrap up. So there's one from Helen and would you need to select invoice and for each invoice manually or can this be set up per customer? I'm assuming this is from the perspective of a Xero user.
I can see Lise thinking about that one.

Yeah. So um, if if you are talking about Xero, then um, the what I've found is if you have an NZBN loaded against that, that customer account, then by default when you're entering that invoice in Xero, the send as eInvoice
button will be available to you. If you don't have an NZBN on the account, then it won't be available.

Yeah.
Yeah, but you do have to physically change that toggle. So we're hoping down the track, hoping down the track that Xero will change the user experience in just, you know, if someone is already one of your your customers is already set up, registered to receive and you had

Yes.

the NZBN number and the contact record, it will just automatically do that for you. But right this at the moment you have to do that little manual exercise of pushing, of changing the toggle.

Right. This might be the last or the second to last question. This one's for you, Linda. Jo McLean, if you can find it, it's a second on the top. So this is around.

Uh, yeah.
Oh, this year. Yeah, yeah, yeah. OK, all right. Actually, this is something I should have covered off during the session. Um. So one of the key trip-ups is, um, when you have registered for an NZBN number, um, there are certain fields that need to be made, that need to be set to public.
Including your business name and address. So what is happening is Xero when you're registering, I'll give the Xero example when they're registering to receive einvoices, they are validating you by looking at the NZBN
record and saying do these the information you've given me match with what's in the NZBN record and if you don't have that information set to public then they can't actually do that validation. So I would go into your log into your my NZBN
and check that those fields are set to public and not private. Um, feel free to send us an e-mail um, separately on that and we might be able to see if we can help you through that, but have have a crack at that first.
Hope that makes sense.

It can be also a bit fussy about if your address isn't exactly the same in both places. If your address in Xero is different to the address that you've set against your NZBN record, it can be quite fussy.

Thank you, Linda.
Okie dokie. One last question before we wrap up and have some lunch. So I have a question from Bao Her. Sorry again about customer suppliers who do not have NZBN. These could be individual contractors who do not have NZBN numbers and probably do not plan to create one.
Could we just e-mail invoices instead of enabling the invoices, the invoicing for these types of customers or suppliers? Well, essentially that's the only choice other than snail mail. If they don't have an NZBN, they don't have an eInvoicing phone number. Therefore you've got a roadblock right there, there and then.

All right, before we wrap up, just one quick question we'd like you to to use. Can you please use the React function and give us a thumbs up if you found that this session has been useful for you. So if you can do that, that will be great. Otherwise reminder
to go and register to receive. Um
You know, update all your contact records, get your Xero subscription bill set so they can you can receive it as an eInvoice. And yeah, we will send out e-mail you a copy of this presentation. The recording will be available in a couple of weeks and we'll let you know about that.

Thank you.

Welcome to those of you who have just joined us. We’re going to give it a couple of minutes just while we wait for more people to join the webinar.
And just acknowledge that there's going to be a bit of a beeping sound as people join us. It should end in a minute or two.

So while we're waiting, just so you know, so we've had a look at who's registered for the webinar and it's a mix of local government, wider government and also quite happy to see quite a few of you have signed up from the private sector as well. So, I hope you get some value out of this.
I'll just give another 30 seconds to a minute before we kick off.
Okie dokie, I think I'll make a start.
So first we'll just kick off with the MBIE Karakia 

Welcome everybody. I am the government subject matter expert in prompt payments and I'm also the government lead for Invoicing support in the public sector. I've been to the Invoicing team since its inception about 5 and a half years ago and my background spans accounting, finance and in particular procure to pay processes and systems.
I love my job. Now some of my colleagues from the invoice have joined us today. So, hello everyone. In particular, I'd like to introduce my colleagues Linda and Alison, who will be participating during this webinar. Now just for a little bit of housekeeping, we will send out a copy of this presentation after the webinar.
It will contain links of relevance, which Alison Smith, our adoption advisor, will be pasting into the chat throughout the webinar. This webinar is being recorded. It will be saved on our website, and we will share a link with you in about two or three weeks. The core presentation should take about 20 minutes or so.
And the remainder of the time will be to work through your questions. If your questions remain unanswered at the end of the webinar, please redirect them to us at einvoicing@mbie.govt.nz. Now of particular note, when asking questions, please use the Q&A function and do not use the chat function.
This will help us triage your questions more effectively and do ask questions throughout the webinar. My colleagues will try and answer as many questions as possible in the chat, but anything left over will be triaged to me at the end of the presentation.
Now, there will also be an online poll towards the end of the webinar. Alison will drop a link in the chat for you closer to the time. And as I touched on earlier, many of you have joined us today from local government. Some of the webinar content will be more targeted towards you. However, the content is still very, very relevant for those of you who work in wider government.
And again, for those from the private sector, I'm pleased you're joining us and I hope you find value in this webinar and particular ideas to improve your payment times.
Now the reason most of you are here is because there's a government requirement or an expectation for your organisation to pay Invoices promptly. For wider government, this is the New Zealand government procurement rules. Now I'm going to talk more about them shortly, but for those of you who are local government.
Ministers Watts and Penk sent a letter to your chief executive last October. I have an extract of this on screen right now, and I've got the main driver behind the letter highlighted. So, the government wants to move cash around the economy faster and promote economic growth.
This is one of the key benefits of prompt payments and eInvoicing. However, there are many benefits when you move cash around the economy faster. It boosts aggregate demand, which leads to higher GDP growth. It also improves liquidity, and this means businesses gain quicker access to funds,
which reduces reliance on credit and lowers financing costs. It also strengthens working capital and resilience during downturns. So, these requirements were expanded from central government to encompass wider government early last year. Now the government is encouraging councils to adopt the same approach to further demonstrate leadership to the private sector.
 I'd like you to think of us as an opportunity. However, we'd like to say here in the invoice and team that compliance is actually an opportunity in disguise. I understand many councils and other organisations not covered under the NZGP rules have already adopted prompt payment practices. So go you. 
I'm now going to give a brief overview of the two NZGP rules which over what about 100 government organisations are required to follow and Ministers Watts and Penk obviously expecting councils to follow. Alison is about to paste a link to this rule in the chat. 
So for the extractors of the prompt payment rules as they appear on the NZGP website, I acknowledge that these rules are a bit of a mouthful, but in short, agencies are required to pay 95% of domestic Invoices within 10 working days and aim to pay eInvoices within 5 working days.
Councils are expected to participate as specified in the letter from Watts and Penk. The results will be published. If your council does not respond to the survey, we will still publish your council's name on the website that has not responded. 
Now I'm going to give a bit of background on the prompt payment requirements.
So I've been leading the charge with this since I started the role 5 and a half years ago. It's been a successful initiative, and it has been collectively met on average by central agencies since its inception, and it's also been collectively met by wider governments since mid-last year. 
As already touched on, cash flow can be a real problem for businesses.
Supplies to government, support this initiative and report noticeable improvement in payment times. I remember soon after the central government met the 95% target, I contacted a number of recruitment agencies and all of them reported an increase, in faster payment times, which really helps their business.
So this initiative promotes transparency to businesses and sends a positive message to the business community with government setting them as an example. We've also found that it generates friendly competition among agencies in the CFO community and also accounts payable teams have been empowered by the target. It gives them purpose.
This extract of the payment time rules covers the high-level reporting requirements. The key point here is the clock starts when an invoice has been entered into your finance system, not the invoice date. The criteria and the rules do not cover every scenario.
Over and above the payment types specified in the slide, there are a few invoice types that can be excluded. These include consolidated invoices, reoccurring invoices, direct debits, disputed invoices (that's if they are difficult to identify), as well as grants and levies. All of these are outlined in the payment time stack sheet, which I'm going to talk more about shortly.
Now I want to cover some of the mechanics of the survey. The survey is issued late in the month after each quarter, so that means the next survey will be issued in late April. Also, your CFO is required to sign out your submission. We then concurrently publish the results and share them with ministers and respondents.
Catching the data is relatively straightforward. Most agencies have already developed automated reports. Meanwhile, a lot of ERPs have developed reports as well. So, Oracle have a report in production. TechnologyOne is putting the finishing touches on a report which I believe will be included in their 2026A release.
SAP have guidance available on how to configure a report and Datascape have expressed an interest and said they will consider developing a report if customers request it. So, if you're on Datascape, get in touch with your Datascape account manager and knock on their door, it might save you a bit of time.
So this quality survey is also a mechanism for MBIE to track and report the eInvoicing progress to ministers. I'm now going to move on to some reporting tips and considerations.
So the key point here is to avoid unnecessary effort trying to nail down payment dates for messy invoices, provided they don't materially impact your numbers. We really want to avoid reporting on your payment times being burdensome.
And rather, we want you to invest your energy into speeding up your payment times. With this in mind, this is a high trust model, no auditing is planned. We want you to try and ensure consistency in reporting across periods. This is particularly important to the different system definitions of invoice receipt and payment dates.
Please consider materiality. If you have a low volume of Invoices that are difficult to capture, then don't waste your time identifying them. But please, please, please declare it in your survey commentary. Be transparent.
I'm now going to share some of what we've been told has been working for many agencies and this is all in order of what's working the best. So, consider increasing the frequency of your payment runs. This is one of the first things to consider. Here at MBIE we process about 60,000 Invoices a year and we made the call a couple of years ago to have daily payment runs. It's about finding the Goldilocks zone for your organization. If you have high invoice volumes, more frequent pay runs should be more viable. Another key consideration is to update the payment terms in your accounts payable system. Most Systems default payment setting is triggered by the invoice date. A quick fix is to change this to pay now terms.

Another thing to consider is your invoice approval processes. Review if your checks and measures are fit for purpose. Sometimes they're overcooked, I've found. 

Now quite broadly, system and process improvements, fancy new tools and reengineering processes save time. I think one simple thing I was reflecting on yesterday is to encourage your vendors to use your centralized accounts payable mailbox rather than sending invoices to the business contacts. We know it happens and there's some organizations that it happens a lot. When invoices go directly to your centralized mailbox you get visibility earlier and you can process them earlier. And now the obvious one, eInvoicing. In this context, it's just another channel, but it should shave at least a few days off processing times. MBIE is running at about 15% of inbound invoices being processed as eInvoices.
So some agencies are also reporting higher numbers and counting. Suppliers sending invoices to government report overall faster payment time. So, it is working. But this isn't an eInvoice webinar, so I'm going to stop talking about that now.

Here are a few more considerations. I recommend you proactively report on payment times internally. I've seen this generate friendly competition among business units. One of the key tools we have found to be effective in driving messaging from your senior leadership; hold your managers to account and celebrate success. 
Staffing constraints, well, it's a bit obvious, but this is an ongoing challenge on the current environment. If your leadership team is serious about paying your suppliers promptly, then they'll need to ensure your accounts payable team are adequately resourced. Contract terms; review your key contracts and consider payment terms and procurement or contract processes. Lucky last, training and education;
Internal change management is key. Raise awareness and drive accountability.

Alison is about to paste a link to the Payment times factsheet in the chat. This is a comprehensive guide. It's a resource which I encourage you to familiarise yourself with if you haven't already. The Payment times factsheet is a downloadable PDF that includes reporting guidance, FAQs, how to submit your data and a comprehensive list of suggestions to improve your payment times. It also includes a link to a sample survey so you can get a feel for the reporting requirements. 
Now the core questions on the survey include total invoices entered in the quarter, invoices paid within 10 working days, and how long on average to enter invoices into your system. The survey also has questions on eInvoicing.
Because of different workflow solutions and delays in invoices being entered into your system, a consistent measuring stick is quite hard to determine across agencies. For this reason, published reporting is broken down into three categories, which I'm going to show you on screen shortly on our website.
It's broken down into efficient, moderate and slow invoice data entry. There are varying workflow solutions in place across government, and some organizations simply take longer to enter invoices. This is often due to high volumes, 

Right, so on screen now is the MBIE website for showing the results for wider government payment time reporting. So, we'll be producing, I suppose, a sister page for local government. It was a little bit, unwieldy. We've got high level results at the top, but what I wanted to walk you through is the three separate tables.
So the first table is efficient invoice data entry. This is where invoices have been entered within one business day. So, these are these are the agencies which are on fire, and you can see most of them green and meeting the target. Then we move down to the second table, moderate invoice data entry and this is where invoices have been entered in between two and four days. And then lastly, if they were entered in five days or more.
Now a few final words before we start working through your questions.
For those of you in local government, I encourage you all to configure or explore reports in preparation for the first survey, which, as mentioned earlier, is due to be issued in late April. Identify your baseline. If you're tracking below 95%, put a plan in place to improve your payment times.
There are loads and loads of suggestions outlined in the Payment times factsheet. These suggestions have been come from all the various initiatives agencies have done over the years.
Lastly, I also want to take this opportunity to talk about the Procuretopay Community of Practice. I think there's a few people here who do attend it. We also call it the P2P COP. This is a quarterly knowledge sharing networking meeting for government organisations. We share challenges and successes in procuretopay processes and systems, and it has a strong focus on the invoicing and prompt payments. The P2P COP is a useful platform to network, share notes and collectively solve problems. It will be of interest to councils who already have started their prompt payment and eInvoicing journeys. The next P2P COP is on 31st of March. I mean to send out the invites, but please e-mail us if you would like to attend.
Now before I get to the Q&A, we will do our poll now. Alison is about to put a link in the chat, but what I might do actually, I'm just going to map back.
Actually, hold up. I've jumped the gun. We meant we're doing Q&A now, aren't we? Sorry, the poll's last. Right. So, I'm going to stop sharing the screen and hand it over to Linda and see if I haven't got any questions in there, Linda.

Yes, Andrew. So, George Smith has asked, are CCOs, i.e. RTOs and EDAs included within this requirement and do you know if Xero has this functionality? Excuse my ignorance, I don't know what those acronyms mean.

I don't know what they are either. I'm about to Google them. I'm so sorry.

I guess it's a type of government agencies. Yeah. George, if you want to clarify what those are, we will, try and answer your question.

Yeah, if you could, put something in the comments towards, that'd be great.

Yeah, in the Q&A part of it, that’d be great. Now Julie Perkins has asked a question, but I'm pretty sure you answered this during your presentation, but it might be worthwhile just reiterating this for all those who are attending to here today. 

So where do we go to find out specifically what will be required to report so we can organize template reports so we can comply with this reporting standard.

17:55
Well, I'll tell you what. If you give me a moment, why don't I open up the Payment times factsheet? Just to get a quick tour. Just bear with me a moment.

Yeah, cause I understand when you do send out the survey, Andrew, that you include, the template so that they can see that.

Yes, I do. Yeah. So, this this is the payment times fact sheet. Earlier in the presentation I mentioned that there is, a link to a sample survey. So, it's towards the bottom, I think.
And here's the link to a sample survey. But also, when we issue the survey, we send out an Excel version of the survey. This is because some agencies require their CFO to physically sign it out and so they complete the copy of the survey and a spreadsheet before actually entering it into the SurveyMonkey tool. So, the first part of the Payment times factsheet does give quite a lot of comprehensive guidance. It takes an extract of what was actually included in the cabinet paper, and then it works for a bunch of FAQs and these FAQs have been generated essentially based off all the queries I got early on in payment time reporting just to try and capture every scenario. I did cover some of these earlier, so yes, Julia, I hope that answers your question, but you've got our details. If there's any other points of clarification, do get
in touch. But I just want to reinforce that one of the important things here with payment time reporting is consistency. Usually there's often some confusion as to whether some invoices are in period A or period B. It doesn't really matter as long as you consistently report them across periods the same way, because then that measuring stick is consistent as well.

Michelle has asked. We already have weekly payments set up for our suppliers and the biggest delays are the staff processing their invoices to the purchase orders rather than scanning and uploading of invoices. So how is eInvoicing going to improve this?
Another few questions. Is it only around the accountability and calling staff out who don't match their invoices regularly? Why can't we raise awareness and accountability but still use our own current systems? It's a bit there to unpack.

Linda, would you like to answer the first part of that question around how is the invoicing going to improve this? And I'll look at answering the second part of it.

Yeah. So, I guess these the biggest part is that it gets into your system pretty much immediately. So, it's a lot faster to get into the system. And the second part is the accuracy of the data that's been put in there. So, the data goes in there completely and it makes it easier for staff to code them and therefore they get that part of the process can be speed up. But the part about getting your staff to approve, that's a perennial problem that everyone has, and that's your senior leadership and, empowering your accounts payable people to hustle those people along.

Thank you, Linda. Just an addition to that.
Yeah, there's loads of little things you can do to try and let's say police people who aren't coding or approving invoices or purchase orders on time. With us at Ministry of Justice this is like a lead a project in this space and one thing that we did is we
use the management accounting and finance business partner community to basically be the policeman, to be the henchman. And so, we would have live reports and go right, here’s your troublemakers and actually go over to their desk and go, excuse me, Mister, you've been sitting on that invoice for one or two weeks now and sitting on that that PO etc. The other thing that I touched on earlier and Linda also mentioned this is really driving the messaging from your SLT, from your senior leadership, It really does make a difference and in a similar respect when things go well the senior leadership team should be acknowledging it as well, so driving from the top and holding managers to account.

All right, a question from Helen. She's got two questions. Invoices stuck in the system as incorrect PO or no PO on invoice, are these regarded as disputed as we have no control on length of time it will be solved? And then there's a second question, but should we answer the first one?

Yeah, invoices stuck in the system as incorrect PO or no PO on invoice. So that sounds like an error on the supplier's behalf. If that's the case, then that wouldn't be fair for you to be to be penalized, so to speak.
So I would say that in that scenario that they are disputed because you need to follow up with the supplier to get the details because whoever's in the AP team won't necessarily, Yeah, it depends on the searchability of whether or not you can actually look up a PO or not. In some cases, well, in a lot of cases, usually you'll be going back to the supplier anyway because most PO shops are no PO, no pay, and so you're trying to drive that behaviour. So, I would call them disputed.

Second part to the question, if we are having to borrow money, what official stance is there on us meeting the five days impact on ratepayers?

Right. There's absolutely no expectation to borrow money to pay your invoices promptly. This is something we've come across in in wider government as well. If sometimes there's links on the chain which fall over and so an organization has cash flow problems. And one organisation has actually used this reporting to highlight. So, in other words, they're not meeting the target, they're way off it and they're not receiving prompt payment interestingly from other government organisations, which therefore means they don't have the liquidity to pay their suppliers on terms of 10 days or less. However, that particular organisation is still paying their suppliers within the contracted terms. Service suppliers are happy. So, I mean it is a target, but it is also a mechanism.
Now what is the official stance on the five days for E Invoicing?
I think I might go off topic a wee bit here, but the five-day eInvoicing payment time target was put in place to incentivise suppliers to become eInvoicing enabled and to send your e-invoices. The reality is that it's not a practical target because when an eInvoice enters your system, it's essentially following exactly the same process as a normal invoice. An eInvoice, they could shave two to three days off the data entry depending on OCR solutions the backlogs for accounts payable, etc. Linda, have you got anything to add on that one?

Yeah, I guess there is probably a presumption that an eInvoice is going to be more accurate and have less errors and maybe therefore less exceptions because of all that data coming in completely and there's no errors from manual intervention or impulse. So, I'll just add that, yeah.

All right, should we move on? So, Christina, she says, I preface this with I'm all on board for change, but I've been thinking about eInvoicing and have a few questions which we've sort of covered off a little bit here. Councils are being directed to pay our invoices quicker. Has any thought been given to how can councils collect on our invoices quicker to help balance cash flows, so we don't have a false economy where we are borrowing to pay out invoices early. I think you might have answered that one. 

Yeah, I do have a comment there though, Christina, I mean.
If every organisation in the invoicing workflow or food chain pays their invoices promptly, then everyone's better off. But it just takes one link in the chain, and often that link in the chain slows things down due to due to process or system issues, or more often than not, bad behaviour, bad actors.
And we know that there's a lot of cases like that in the private sector. The government is really keen to try and drive prompt payment across the economy. There was a piece of legislation and there's a Business Payment Practices Act, which was recently repealed, which did require large businesses to pay promptly. Because that's been repealed, the government's a little bit short on options, but we are giving advice to government on other policy leaders and yeah, it’s going to be, you know, a long-term game. I should move to the second part of the question, Linda.

How do you stop an eInvoice from being automatically paid if checks around quality need to be paid by our staff first?
I can answer that. So, eInvoicing is just another channel, just to quote Andrew, another channel to get the invoice data into your system. It does not replace or include any automation of approvals and payments.
So your normal approval and payment check still need to apply. So, there's no automatic payment happening in that space. 

Not using PDF stopping fraud is great but does invoicing channel all our invoice through one portal system, which then points us at all one point of risk. What is being put in place for the system to not be hacked? Oh, I'm not sure.
It's a tricky one.

Well, it is a tricky one. I mean eInvoicing is a secure network. Every access point provider goes through an annual accreditation process. And as of this year, I believe every access point also needs to be ISO 9001 certified, which is the security certification. The thing with standard invoices, most invoices are transmitted via e-mail as a PDF. e-mail is an inherently insecure channel. In fact, only about 70% of emails are successfully delivered. I haven't fully answered that, but I think it covers some of the bases.

Yeah, Chelsea has asked. Hi, our purchase order approvals and matching are generally where our batch processes are held up. How does eInvoicing fit in with purchase orders?
Well, I'll have a crack at answering that one. So, purchase order numbers are a data point within the invoice that is sent and put into your system, straight into your system. So, you can apply some business rules that does that three-way matching. And so, if they've got the correct purchase order number on there, the business have goods receipted it for the amount of the invoice, then all of those things match, then you can do that automatically and that should actually help speed up processing of an invoice. If any one of those things are not right, so particularly if the business haven't goods receipted it, then I guess it will hold things up. Hopefully that's answered your question there.

Well, I'm going to cherry pick the next one, Linda. I've kind of already answered that. It's from Adele Bird. Councils only receive income via quarterly rates payments. To achieve these timeframes, we might need to borrow, which comes at the cost of our rates payments. Obviously expected to follow these timeframes if it comes to the cost, just to reinforce it. 
Absolutely not. Potentially this is an opportunity to highlight some of your challenges in the commentary.

Chelsea Jackson Hi our finance system is MagicQ. OK, I see you mentioned take one of our systems that councils use. Does MagicQ have any reporting underway regarding eInvoices? 
Well, Magic Q is enabled for E Invoicing.
But, we haven't engaged them to discuss prompt payment reporting. That's because it's not that widely used. But maybe we'll take an action to just reassess how many councils are on MagicQ and look at engaging them.
We've got finance system information for about 60% of councils and we've been using that to help drive some of our discussions and based on the data we've got, we didn't realise that many were on it. So that's something we can look into.

Council with one AP staff member working 30 hours per week. We pay fortnightly and make sure that invoices due within these timeframes are included in each pay run. We have no complaints that we aren't paying on time by local suppliers as we will usually pay them in the earlier pay run anyway.
Is fortnightly not sufficient when no one is requesting earlier payments, and all invoices are paid before or by due dates?
Well, I suspect if you asked any of your suppliers if they'd like to be paid a week earlier, they'd say yes. We need to remember that this is also about promoting good behaviour to the private sector as well and leading by example. I think, Chloe, it's also really just understanding how many invoices you process per year. Usually, it's organizations on sort of 10,000 and less I've found with fortnightly pay runs, but most organizations have at least a weekly pay run, I find if there's sort of above 10,000 invoices per year. But I know that these things, yeah, there's a lot of manual processes, there's a lot of effort required in a pay run. So, you really need to weigh that up and to see if it's viable, but I do encourage you to look into it.
Oh, next one, Linda, for Laura.

Yeah. Is it possible to prevent the issuing company from submitting an eInvoice without a purchase order number?
I guess the question is do you receive a PDF invoice without a purchase order number and what's your process for dealing with that? So, I just challenge you there, do you go straight back to the supplier and ask them to provide it?
Do you try and do some internal searches based on that supplier and see if a purchase order number exists or not? So I guess one of the short answers is that you could choose to let it through and it'll go through an exception process.
Or you could have some business rules that it means the invoice is rejected as long as you have some messaging that goes back to your supplier and that may have to come from you via an e-mail or a phone call. So, I guess it's talking about using similar exception processes that you do now for an invoice that comes through as PDF.
Anything further to add on that, Andrew?

Yes. So e-invoicing is a transmission and receipt structured data and so when it's structured you can put some smarts in place and one thing we discourage is rejecting eInvoices because they don't have what's meant to be in it.
As Linda touched on, you have already had processes in place, basically a paper or PDF invoices. Generally, those processes should be followed where a human engages another human to correct something. However, there are other opportunities of the invoicing and sometimes reference information is put in the wrong place. So, access point providers provide document translation services like rules that go well if somebody's put a PO number over here in this reference field, can you maybe pop it down into this reference field over here? So, at MBIE we've got a number of smarts in place so when a supplier makes what let's call a reoccurring mistake, we can pick up on that and tidy it up.

We've answered in the Q&A section for Naomi, but for the benefit of others on the call here, does the prompt payment terms are for New Zealand suppliers only or does it include payments to overseas buyers as well? 

It is only for domestic trade invoices. So not international.

Right, George has got back to us. Now we know what these acronyms are. And sorry, George, the local government's a fairly new patch for us, so we're still learning some of the lingo. Are Council-Controlled Organisations or Regional Tourism Officers and Economic Development Agents included within this requirement? Do you know of Xero has payment time tracking functionality? 

Two questions there. First question.
I Don't know. The way prompt payments and eInvoicing have been working in terms of Scope is if an organization has a subsidiary which uses the same primary invoicing systems, then it's included. If there's a subsidiary who is on a different platform, then it's generally excluded. One of the rules around the invoice enablement is that it's around enabling your primary systems, not secondary. So, the ones that send will receive the most invoices. One thing with councils and the invoicing is the low hanging fruit is your receivables. It's not it's not send any invoices. It's something we're exploring, and we've been keen to fund the pilot council to look at it, but you know that it could be complicated.
I'm going off track now, I've just realized. Well, second part of the question, do you know if Xero has payment time tracking functionality? No, I do not. Sorry.
I would expect them to, but I do not. It's something that we can look into with our Xero contacts, so feel free to get in touch if it's something you want us to pursue.

Yeah. Christina, we are on MagicQ and we are right at the beginning with trying to get them to prioritize implementation of being able to process eInvoicing. We don't have anywhere for an NZBN to put to be put against the data. Any help to push this along would be great.
It might be one that we'll take away and see if we can investigate for that.

Yeah, yes, there's an action there, Alison, if you could take note for Christina Martin. Yeah, we'll look into that. It sounds like we might need to get in touch with our colleagues at MagicQ.

Now it looks like we've answered all the questions. Do feel free to ask some more, but I'm thinking we might head over to the poll now.
So I was a bit trigger happy earlier on and I'm a bit too excited. 
So, on the screen is a QR code. Meanwhile, Alison should have put a link in the chat if you could click on one of those and it's a very simple, very short poll and I'm going to flick across to it now.
So I thought I'd ask this question because essentially it says, you know, are you already empowered? And it's good to see that quite a few of you already are. It is just good practice. We've got a new question that just came on in.
We'll answer that after the poll.
OK, so a handful of you do and it's good to see that some of you plan to do it soon.
Right. We're going to move on to the last question, a nice simple one. Did you find this webinar useful? And I just acknowledge that we will answer any remaining questions after the poll.
And I I'm impressed. We're almost exactly on time.

OK, and if you haven't found it useful, please send us an e-mail. Always appreciate feedback. We always want to learn and do better.
Fantastic.
I'll end up now.
Right. I see Linda, you've already answered the question. So, speak now or forever hold your peace. If you've got any questions. Otherwise, we might be wrapping up 5 minutes early.
So on that note, goodbye and thank you very much. Enjoy the rest of your day.

Good morning everyone and welcome to receive an Invoicing Capability webinar today. We'll just wait for a couple of minutes for people to join.

Numbers are coming up now, but we'll still just wait a couple more minutes.

Okay, everyone, well, we're at 5 past 11 now, so oh, and just say that some more people are joining. Let's get started.

Thank you so much for joining us today and welcome to this webinar for which we'll talk about implementing of eInvoice receive capability. Now for a bit of housekeeping before we get going, we will send out a copy of this presentation after the webinar. It'll contain links of relevance which
Alison Smith, our adoption advisor, will be posting into the chat throughout the webinar. And the webinar is being recorded. It will be saved on our website and we'll share a link with you in about two weeks. The core presentation is around 25 minutes. The remainder of the time will be to work through your questions.
If your questions do remain unanswered at the end of the webinar, please redirect them to us at Invoicing at mbie.govt.nz. You'll see those e-mail addresses coming through anyway in the chat and on the slides themselves. So of particular note, when you do get to asking questions,
please would you use the Q&A function rather than the chat function. This just helps us triage your questions more effectively and hopefully get all of the questions answered while we're here. There'll be an online poll early in the webinar. Alison will drop a link in the chat for you closer to the time.
And lastly, the majority of you who joined us today are from local government organisations. This webinar will be more targeted towards you, but the content is still very relevant for those of you from wider government. I also see some of you have joined us today from the private sector and we're really pleased to have you here and we hope you find value in this webinar also
in particular, ideas to improve your receive capability. So let's get started with the karakia. If I could pass over to Linda for this, please.

Fantastic. Thanks so much, Linda.
Right, so let's talk about our agenda today. In November, we ran a webinar that covered eInvoicing receive capability at a higher level. Today's session is a follow-on from this, and it will involve us diving a bit deeper into the technical side of implementation. Along with this, we'll cover the resources we have available and some pro tips that we've picked up along the way. I should say that the content
we're covering assumes the audience is already some of the way through their eInvoicing journey, so it won't be completely foreign. To give some background on our role in PEPPOL in New Zealand, the New Zealand PEPPOL Authority sits within MBIE. Our team is small, but we cover many aspects such as PEPPOL standards, stakeholder engagement, and the technical and non-technical side of how to implement.
We work closely with the Australian PEPPOL Authority too, which is the Australian Tax Office, and we share the Australian New Zealand PEPPOL standard with them amongst many other functions, such as the mutual accreditation scheme we have going for access point providers that you will learn a bit more about soon.
So if we could go to the next slide, please.
I'm going to start with mentioning this resource first, which is our ANZ PEPPOL ..

Sorry to interrupt, Lise. Are we going to do the poll now?

Yeah.
Oh, I'm sorry. Yes, sorry. Alison is just going to share a poll on the screen. We just want to clarify whereabouts you are at in your journey.

Yeah, I've put a link to the poll in the chat and I'm just about to share the poll itself on screen, which will have a QR code for you to link to as well.

Perfect, thank you.
So yeah, does your organisation use any of these types of automation already?

Interesting, very interesting.

Yes.
Ah, that's flattening out. Would you like me to move to the next slide, Lise?

Yeah, sure. Thank you. Yes, please.
So what stage are you at at your eInvoicing journey so far?

This is great. This means I've got a whole lot of information for you all.

To the presentation.

Okay, I'm going to stop sharing now. We will actually include screen grabs of the results of those in the e-mail when it goes out later today.

Great. Could we please go to the slide previous?

Thank you.
All right, I got away with myself there a little bit, but I'm going to start with mentioning this resource first, which is our ANZ PEPPOL eInvoicing Business Guide. I'm aware that I'm going to cover a lot of information today and I'd like to reassure you that we have it documented also ready for you to refer back to when you need.
So, as I said, it's the eInvoicing Business Guide, and it's available on the website and via the link in the chat that Alison is going to add, and as well as the link on the actual presentation itself. We created this to document advice and lessons that we've learned from
good 60 government Invoicing implementations. We also had import from the agency eInvoicing Champions that have already enabled, as well as a number of industry specialists. Most things you need to know are covered clearly in this document, and it's written to cover a wide range of readers. You can lean on other resources available from MBIE, your provider, and other agencies.
There will be links to ours as we move through the webinar, and Alison, as I said, will add these links as we go through.
So, next slide, please.
So, what is PEPPOL eInvoicing? PEPPOL eInvoicing is the digital exchange of invoice information directly between buyers and suppliers financial systems, but this transfer is made possible by the sender and receiver, each having eInvoice enabled software and an access point provider or two in the middle to...
transmit using the common PEPPOL standard. So I'm going to touch on the NZBN now because it's a super important piece of the puzzle. The essential part from a supplier and a customer point of view is that each party's NZBN needs to be captured on both sides.
To clarify, the supplier's customer master record should hold the customer's NZBN. And on the other side, the customer's supplier master record should also hold the supplier's NZBN so that they can basically talk to each other. The NZBN effectively access the way the different systems identify each other as a customer or a supplier.
So it's kind of like, I know you might think about maybe an account number or an e-mail address or something like that that you, between trading you know of the other parties reference, but yeah, for eInvoicing it must be the NZBN. In Australia and in other countries, mostly it's the ABN or the tax number, but New Zealand's.
slightly different in that we use the NZBN. That doesn't matter from a trading with other countries perspective, it's all built into the specification.
So the data flows in a four corner model like this. So the C1, so the C corner 1 is what I'm trying to say there, is the suppliers billing system or FMIS, so Financial Management Information Software. It includes the NZBN.
and the invoice data being sent, but they also need to include the NZBN of the customer they're sending to. In the world of emailing a PDF, the way of delivering that invoice to the customer was with an e-mail address. With eInvoicing, there's no e-mail at all. It's all about the NZBN, so it's essential to include it.
When this invoice is sent from the supplier's billing system, it passes to the corner 2, which is the supplier's access point provider.
So the access point provider picks it up and checks that the invoice contains all of the mandatory information per the PEPPOL specification, two of these being the customer and supplier NZBNs. It then looks up the customer's NZBN on the PEPPOL network. So it goes away and checks out to make sure that the...
This is a valid NZBN, and then also looks to see one whether they can receive eInvoices, and because to receive eInvoices you must register on the PEPPOL Network, and then to find out who the access point provider is, so the corner 3 that looks after the customer that is ultimately going to receive that invoice.
Then assuming all of these conditions are met, the sender's access point provider passes it on to the customer's access point provider.
So then, the customer's access point provider receives the eInvoice data, carries out any further checks required, such as rechecking that the eInvoice aligns with the PEPPOL standard. It's just something that all of the access point providers do as part of their service. And
want to make sure that it aligns with the standard and then along with any other services that they've agreed to do for their customer, so such as data transformation, maybe checking for particular fields that they might want to remap on the way through, that kind of thing. And then the invoice data is sent off to the
The customer s FMIS
So then when the customer's FMIS receives that eInvoice, generally it'll pass into a processing queue in the FMIS and the first match that's actually done is on that NZBN, so that's when it becomes really important. If the customer holds the NZBN in their supplier records, which I hope they do, then the eInvoice automatically is assigned to that supplier account.
So, as I said before, you know, it's really key in identifying the suppliers involved and the customers involved. Other checks are done after this in an FMIS, and it varies greatly across systems, but generally a system will validate the references supplied
If there's enough information on the eInvoice data that's been sent, maybe it has a purchase order attached to that invoice that where it's already been receipted, so it's seen to be approved, so then the invoice can just, depending on the software, can be three-way matched and then pulled through as an invoice ready to.
be paid. Like I said, though, it does vary across systems. And just to add a little more to this, the access point providers are generally able to send and receive success and failure messages on the way through that four corner cycle. We'll cover a little bit more about this a wee bit later.
Okay, could we have the next slide, please?
So there are three distinct steps to a successful implementation. The software that you're receiving the eInvoice through, the connection to the PEPPOL network, and then there's the business processes and supplier onboarding piece. We'll cover each of these in more detail on the next slides.
Next slide, please.
So there are two parts of the software piece. The software that will actually receive your eInvoices, so that might be your AP automation system, or it might be your FMIS, your Xero, your TechOne, any of those, and plenty of others.
And so there'll be that software and then there's also the part of seeing whether your software has an inbuilt access point. So I'm just going to pause here on the software bit and just say that it's worth noting the NZ government procurement rules.
that require government agencies to send and receive based on their invoice volumes annually have recently been upsized to include councils and wider government. And we know that we have a number of representatives from councils here today.
The business guide contains detailed information about how you might implement eInvoicing, but the key is the NZGP or the New Zealand Government Procurement rules refer to your primary system. So whichever that system is that you receive the majority of your supplier invoices through right now.
And when we think about software received capability, eInvoicing works best in your natural business software. And by natural software, we mean your finance systems, your ERPs, your OCRs, AP automation, that kind of thing. eInvoicing is really just another channel that sits along all those other existing channels.
OK, if we could move to the next slide, please.
The next piece of the puzzle is how your system connects to the PEPPOL eInvoicing Network. When we look at how we connect to the PEPPOL Network, there are two parts: the software that receives those einvoices, as well as whether that software has an input access point, as I mentioned earlier. It's ideal if your software is already
einvoice capable and many are the main einvoice capable ERPs we know of being used by governments right now and being received receiving einvoices successfully are Tech One, Oracle Fusion, Microsoft Business Central and SAP. There are certainly others. Some small agencies are actually using Xero too.
If you're in doubt about whether your software is capable, we have published a list. You can ask your provider, but also we've published a list of our eInvoicing capable software products on our website via the link on the screen and Alison will add that to the chat.
If your software isn't capable, then there are still options available to you. So your OCR provider may have a plug and play option for you, that's quite common, or an access point provider may also be able to help you.
So then the next part is how your software will actually connect to the PEPPOL network. This is usually done via an access point provider, as explained a bit earlier. The ERP such as SAP have an access point built in, but in most cases the organisation will need to engage an access point provider separately.
If you need the services of an access point provider and you're a government agency, there's a government syndicated panel in place with seven providers to choose from. MBIE has done the procurement on your behalf for this, so there is no need to run a full procurement process. And all of our panel providers have done
many, many successful implementations. If you haven't already, go to the New Zealand Government Procurement website for detail about the open agreement and the process for requesting the buyer's guide. Part of this will be starting off by after you've initially requested, you need to sign an NDA.
Alison will post the link on the screen in the chat.
We also have a page on our eInvoicing website that lists all our access point providers that have current accreditation with the New Zealand and Australian PEPPOL Authority, so that's also a really good place to start and narrow down your search.
Alright, can we go to the next slide, please?
So the third aspect is about reviewing your current processes and considering those that we need to change to accommodate eInvoicing and this can be quite time intensive. We've seen that the most successful implementations are that are where the processes are adapted to wrap around eInvoicing rather than the other way around. So there will be some.
some tweaks or changes to your processes. For example, if you use purchase orders and there's opportunity to automate how the eInvoices come in and match to the POs and associated receipts, then you'll need to look at how your existing business processes may need to adjust and maybe to your workflows in your system.
for eInvoicing. And then there's the change management part. So some of us might say this is the hardest part. We strongly recommend stressing to your users that eInvoicing is just another channel. You know, change is hard and there may be a few changes to everyday tasks, but over time everyone will see the benefits.
And the transition from PDF to an eInvoices will take some time. It's not going to happen overnight. It does take time. Everybody says that, but has done it already. The speed of this is up to you and will depend on the rate at which you're able to transition your suppliers to this eInvoicing channel. One thing we see a lot is the challenge.
is the challenge of staff being becoming used to receiving eInvoices instead of PDFs. So this can be at the finance user level where they now see eInvoice data by default, or it can be for approvers that are used to having the invoices or copies of them sent to them directly from the supplier before they pass them on to the finance team every
accounts payable, person's nightmare. Things get lost, people go away on holiday, can't approve their invoices, that kind of thing. This is something that takes time to address and it can be managed with the appropriate training and preparation of some good user guides and honestly does get easier.
So, and then we come to the supplier customer communication and onboarding area. So it's important to keep focus on transitioning your suppliers to einvoicing. You'll see the benefits if you do. That said, as I've probably already indicated, it can be a long game. We suggest starting with your low-hanging fruit first, and those that will
receive benefits to the organisation first. Perhaps you'll have some suppliers, you know, already sending invoices to other agencies. Focus on those ones and the ones that have simple requirements.
If you need any help with identifying suppliers that are already sending einvoices to government, we maintain a list of suppliers to government that is updated every quarter. This may be a good place to start and you can download that list from our website and Alison was putting the link in the chat.
We also have a wider range of resources available on our website to assist, including a couple of amazing guides created by Linda here, the eInvoicing Change Management Guide and the Supplier Communications Toolkit, really worth downloading and reading.
And also, if you're looking for more tips in this area, then we just happen to be running a webinar next week dedicated to Supplier onboarding on Wednesday. And we encourage you to register if you haven't already.
Okay, next slide please.
So now I'm going to get a little bit more technical and talk about a couple of technical pieces that underpin PEPPOL eInvoicing. The first one is the PINT ANZ PEPPOL billing specification. So in summary, really, if you're sending or receiving an eInvoice across the PEPPOL network, you must use this specification, this particular one.
And with respect to what's actually in that specification from a user perspective, if you think about the fields that you would populate if you were creating an invoice from scratch, you know, as in a data entry view, the supplier and customer details, the invoice number, date, due date, GST number,
all that sort of stuff, as well as the line items and prices being charged. All of these fields are also transmitted by PEPPOL in the same way every time, and they mapped the sending and receiving parties in FMIS software.
And the specification itself does contain about around 200 elements or fields, but there's a lot you can make use of if you wanted to, but actually about 25 to 30 of them are mandatory, including those that I've listed out, kind of the general areas that I've listed out there. So
Supplier details, their legal name, their address, GST number, customer details, same again, name, GST number, address, invoice numbers and dates, due dates, item details, tax, tax information, currencies.
And then the references, which I'm sure when you start working on your implementations for eInvoicing, you'll learn all about references, because they're super important. And of course, I don't know why I put that last there, but the NZBN should be at the top. That's obviously really key.
And then, so the specification, it's mandatory for all PEPPOL accredited access point providers when they're sending and receiving eInvoices in New Zealand and Australia.
And as I suggested earlier, New Zealand and Australian PEPPOL authorities work together very closely, so we share that spec.
And one of the other things about this particular specification, the ANZ PINT specification, is that it allows trade between countries. And so that's at the moment, more so New Zealand and Australia. We were the first to adopt it, but the rest of the world's catching up with us quite quickly.
Okay, next slide, please. Be sick of hearing my voice by now, I'm sure.
So this slide covers off the other technical piece that I wanted to talk about, which is the industry practise statement for invoice content. So this was developed by the New Zealand Australian PEPPOL Authority, so MBIE and Australian Tax Office, along with
the digital service providers of Australia and New Zealand. So they are also PEPPOL specialists and industry specialists. So it's not mandatory for everyone to use it, but that's strongly recommended. The New Zealand syndicated panel providers, so the seven access point providers we have on our
government panel do have to comply with it. It's a condition of their agreement. So it's actually, whilst it's a bit less technical, it's a nice user-friendly way of looking at technical information. And it's really good for
adding sort of real life considerations for your organisation when you're looking to implement eInvoice capability. It recognises basically that if organisations just work with the specification on its own and send only the mandatory data elements in there,
from the specification, then it doesn't always give the medium to large businesses and government buyers enough information to be able to get those invoices through efficiently. And it's aiming to give guidance to access point and software providers also so that everyone is
thinking about actually how does this eInvoicing thing work in practice, where the people are involved.
And so.
Essentially, there are a number of fields that have been discussed and we've had feedback on over the years about that we that we believe should be strongly considered to include when you are in your einvoice data when you're transferring it through, and as well as that, we've rated them.
under three different ratings. So we've got the required for interoperability, so they're the really frequently required elements, fields, and are vital to automate. Just the recommended, just slightly down the chain, these help buyers achieve quicker, more straightforward processing, such as three-way matching, so you purchase orders, that kind of thing.
and the conditional ones which might be included in the interest of supporting buyer processing.
and enriching the business information. So that might be the kinds of fields where they, like a purchase order line reference, which adds more information or more richness to the data and allows particular receivers to do more with that invoice data when it comes in, but then at the same time,
They're not necessarily the common fields that every type of software can support. And so that's really important to remember.
Okay, can we go to the next slide, please?
Promise, I'm almost done.
So, let's talk about the learnings that we've had so far while we've been doing this.
So the overall goal of eInvoicing is the faster processing and payment of Invoices, regardless of what side you're on, whether you're the customer or the supplier. And so, I'm just going to go through a few tips here. While the technical side of the implementation is going on, we strongly recommend that the first thing you do
is start collecting NZBNs from your suppliers. It's something that can just be worked on in the background, and it's, as I've labelled several times already, the NZBN is the key field. So it's super important to collect this information and get it updated on your supplier.
master data. Get the right people on the project team and ensure you've got a project sponsor. It's always really good to have someone that owns it.
And we believe there should be a good mix of users and technical experts to build the best solution.
So yeah, buyer references and purchase order references, they're super important as well and they can be a real issue. They're the references that are provided to give context on what the invoices are for. If you take time to identify these with your supplier.
per supplier, sorry, and map them, map your data processes so that you know that you're going to capture these once you're testing your eInvoice solution. And for example, if you're transitioning, say, from OCR at the moment, so you scan all of your invoices through, it might be that one of those references
is sits in the body of the invoice somewhere rather than in the header. And so it might be that if you trans that might be could easily be missed, you know, so and it could be a key reference that it doesn't come through with einvoicing and you need it. So it's super important to
to give a lot of time and attention to things like our references.
And really, just to the wider subject of data mapping overall, it's really common for data mapping to cause you problems early on. It's painful, but it's really worthwhile going through a data mapping exercise. It's just a really good way to make sure.
your receiving of the eInvoice journey is going to be as seamless as possible.
And as I touched on a wee bit earlier, due to the software used across different organisations, it's really good to know that some suppliers may not be able to support the fields you'd ideally like to receive. So whilst if they send you a PDF and they've got some additional information, notes and things on there,
It might be that the eInvoicing solution that they have doesn't necessarily support those that extra bit of information in the same way, and and so if I, or you know, sometimes they sometimes systems just support one of the reference fields rather than two, that kind of thing, so.
And there are also different ways that different software manages those references. So on the face of it, for example, Xero, if you are creating an invoice to a customer, then on the face of it, you only see just one reference field on the screen. But actually,
They've got a special way of formatting that reference. So you can actually send multiple references from that one box, which is really, really good. Xero have some really good guidance on this on their website. And whilst I know our audience here is here because of receiving eInvoices,
It's so useful when you're receiving eInvoices and you have suppliers that are using Xero and maybe they're new to sending invoices too. So it's really helpful to have that bit of that tip in your back pocket.
And we've included a link to that, that particular page about sending eInvoices. It's quite a good resource in the chat. So credit note handling. So this is a bit of a trick. So we have an invoice specification that I was talking about earlier.
And then in PEPPOL, there's an invoice document type, and then there's a credit note document type. And they have actually written two separate specifications to handle those two types. However, some software just doesn't support the credit note document type.
You, but it's like...
If you, and if a Xero sender, for example, was to send, create an invoice, send it to the customer, customer received it and said, oh no, that's not right.
Xero, the Xero sender couldn't, you know, say, reference that invoice, say, right-click, for example, and go generate credit, and then be able to send that through as an e-credit note, but if you were to, if the user was to create...
a credit note from scratch. So a new transaction, but put in the negative values, then that would work. And you could send that through as an eInvoice. And so it's just really, it's good to know that some software doesn't look after
the credit notes, but the invoice specification anyway manages the scenario there. So I would say it's probably much cleaner for most just to focus on the invoice option, whether that's a positive value or a negative value. Your access point provider will know,
a lot more about that as well, so feel free to go to them or come to us.
So, I've talked about processing, sorry, documenting processes. So, that's really it's really handy to to do a basically a current state, future state sort of exercise and how to see how you where your gaps are and how your processes will need to adapt to eInvoicing.
One of a couple of the things that are that pop up quite a bit are the exception side of things, so if you...
At the moment, say if you're receiving an eInvoice, sorry, if you're receiving an invoice as a PDF, maybe by e-mail, and the invoice doesn't contain all the information that you need to process it. So you might e-mail back to the supplier, or you might call them and say, hey,
this invoice isn't complete and I need to know what, I need to know this extra information to be able to process it.
When you're moving to eInvoicing, then...
You kind of want to...
keep that a similar supplier experience. You know, you don't want to just, if there's the opportunity to automate getting those eInvoices through, you don't want to be in a position really where eInvoices are taking longer to process because there's less information
that kind of thing, you don't want to reject them because there's not enough information. You really want to keep talking to people and re-educate them and get them, get the right information through in the long term.
And kind of attached to that is putting onerous requirements on your suppliers. So we've seen that a bit with some government agencies where agencies require additional fields or information that they're not day-to-day fields that you normally would use, such as that purchase order line reference. There is a place for that, but
Actually, a lot of businesses can't support that. It's actually, it just leads to an unfavourable experience all around and it inhibits suppliers getting on board. We kind of notice that if a supplier will have a few goes often at sending an eInvoice and then if it's not working, people kind of tend to go, okay, I'm not going to bother then, I'm just going to go back to the old way.
So it's really good to keep communicating, be consistent with your messaging. Actually, eInvoicing is supposed to be easy and I promise that you will get there. If you put the work in now, you'll see the benefit.
And so then when you get to the stage of testing, ensure you select your test partners so that you have a good cross-section of the scenarios and the suppliers that you do work with just to avoid any surprises after you go live.
Um, what else can we learn about?
And yeah, that's another option that you might look at in your maybe in your second phase is to is to if you're using EDI at all to receive some of your invoices, this could be a really good candidate to transition to eInvoicing as well.
And I'm just going to reinforce also, please get familiar with the industry practise statement for invoice content. It's a super good resource. That means something to everyone who is involved in this journey.
Okay, next slide, please.
So we've got some other scenarios that I just wanted to call out basically, and they are around consolidated invoices and utilities invoices. So consolidated invoices, as they stand, don't necessarily fit well into the eInvoicing
processes. So we are working on that. We are very aware and we are in the throes of establishing a working group to get through that topic and work out how we do that. And as well as the technical side of
getting a consolidated invoice, the invoice into a system. It's also, you've also got to think about.
Some of these consolidated invoices will arrive in your system on one day, and because of your processes, you might pay them the next. But if you did that with an eInvoice, it might take a week or two, because the invoices would have to be, the one invoice might have to be split out to 10 or 12, and then it just takes longer.
So trust me, we are working on it. And the other area is the utilities, which is, you know, telecommunications and electricity. So your One New Zealand, Sparks, your Meridians, Mercury Energy, that kind of thing. They historically include data that's
Additional to what you'd normally have on your run-of-the-mill invoice could be that could be that's a massive invoice it might have
way too many pages to even look at. I've certainly seen phone related invoices that are 3000 pages of PDF long. You don't want all that coming in in the eInvoicing channel probably. And we actually see in the end, most receivers don't see the value in ingesting all of that. There's sort of probably
the minimum amount of data that they'll enter into their finance system, but they'll have the detail accessed in another way, whether that's by
a PDF attachment against the account or an Excel or even a portal that they access to look at their bills. And there's also that kind of older format on those types of invoices where they have opening balance, there's adjustments to opening balance, new opening balance plus current.
blah, blah. And so those don't really translate that well into the eInvoicing model right now. So there's quite a lot to think about and we have it all on our work programme to address this year. It's going to involve a lot of surveying of government agency requirements and as I said, working groups are probably the best way to go here.
And so this will help us build and document what these models will look like going forward with suppliers to government, large suppliers to government, sorry, having to provide Invoices to government agencies in January next year. It's just becoming
more of a more front of mind and it hasn't really in the past been so much of an area that that has had to be looked at. And so my last thing, I promise, is I just want to quickly talk about the procure to pay
community of practice, or the P2P CoP is how we refer to it. And I'm mentioning this because we might have some new people on this webinar that aren't aware. So this is a quarterly knowledge sharing networking meeting for government agencies. And so
We mostly talk about eInvoicing the successes and the not so successes, payment time information, that kind of stuff. It's a really good way to network with people, share notes, collectively solve problems. And we also see
different agencies that may use the same software, they might be in different stages of their journey. You might have the ones that have already done it all live and working. And someone else who's also using that system, but they're not really sure where to start or not sure how to nut out a certain problem.
Excuse me. We see people getting together and helping each other, and it's a really good initiative. So our next one is on the 31st of March. And please just e-mail us at eInvoicing@mbie.govt.nz if you'd like to join us.
And then from then on, you'll be added to the invite list and be invited every quarter.
Okay, last slide. Questions. So now's the time to answer your questions. Please use the chat function and ask away. We've run out of time and I've talked for far too long. You can e-mail our team with your questions. We'll have a note of them anyway if you put them in the Q&A.
I mean, thank you. Hello.

And...
Hello, Andrew Cooke here, one of Lisa's colleagues. And firstly, well done, Lise. It was a long and very detailed presentation. We know, it's hard work. Hey, I've been answering some of the questions in the background. And there's a question which I think both myself and Linda Moore are best placed to answer now from Beth Hole. I'll pass some questions to you shortly, Lise, but I think you deserve a break. So Beth is asking, to date, what is the uptake of suppliers invoicing by eInvoicing? I've heard that there has been quite low uptake. I also note that we will be required to have our large suppliers invoice us by eInvoicing. How are we expected to adhere to this requirement? So there's two parts to this question.
How are we currently tracking? So last month, there were just under 10,000 New Zealand businesses that sent or received an eInvoice. That represents about 2% of all businesses or about 5% of our addressable market, of the quarter million businesses in New Zealand have cloud accounting software.
It is growing and there are a lot more suppliers due to become enabled in the coming months. This is the early adoption phase. Now, a prominent software company is due to roll out another bulk registration and we're expecting that that will result in up to, all up will be expecting about 100,000
New Zealand businesses to be enabled for eInvoicing. Currently, it's about 50,000. So that's about 40% of the addressable market. So a lot of our activities are moving towards just getting organisations to use eInvoicing. Now, the second part of the question, I also know that it will be required to have our large suppliers invoice us by eInvoicing. How are we expected to adhere to this requirement?
So this is the sort of thing as a government agency that you will be looking for your procurement and contracts people to incorporate this in procurement processes. So that's the sort of thing that should be considered. Suppliers who are eInvoicing enabled, generally speaking, will get extra points in procurement processes against those suppliers that do not.
Obviously, this is something which will be enacted as contracts expire and new contract processes are commenced. So in other words, existing contracts are not expected to be reviewed. Meanwhile, the New Zealand Government Procurement team are working to update their various contract or AOG templates.
Linda, is there anything else you want to add to that?

No, that was pretty comprehensive, Andrew.

Thank you.
So I've been working through some of the questions and Lise, this is where I'm thinking of putting you on the spot with some of the questions.

Yep.

I'm just trying to work out the best one first, so...

I can see Davina's one here, which is a bit earlier. Yeah.

Yes, yes, and I did respond to that and I suggested that you might have a little bit to add. So how about I read out the question and then you can take it from there. So Davina Wong says, we act as a third party financial intermediary on behalf of multiple government departments. Invoices are addressed to the government department, but we pay them on behalf of the government department.

Yeah.
Okay.

what NZBN do we use if we want to ensure that invoices come to us but still address the government departments? I've responded that this is that you need to use your organization's NZBN for eInvoices to land into your finance system, but you need to ensure that your supplier provides sufficient reference information to identify who the government customer
the invoice is for. Lise, anything further to add to that?

Yeah, so I'm happy to talk with you, Davina, about this offline. It's kind of a niche little situation, but we do have other government agencies doing something similar at the moment. Treasury, for example, look after a number of different ones. Anyway,
There are
There's not just one sender NZBN and one receiver NZBN, there are actually two of each when you get down into the technical nuts and bolts. And so that's how we would manage it. Like I said, we can talk about it separately, but essentially the receivers NZBN one would be probably
yours and the other one would be the NZBN for the agency that you're looking after.

Thanks, Lise. Our next question is from Alyssa Lamb from the Electricity Authority. She's essentially asking about supplier onboarding. So they're already live for eInvoicing and want to get their numbers up. Alyssa, we could give you a very long answer to this. I highly recommend you attend Linda's Supplier onboarding webinar.
Next week, we're going to be going through everything there. Loads of tips and tricks, so we'll park that one if you don't mind. Lise, can you answer the next question from Mary Bedwell? Do you have test eInvoices available?

Yeah, sure.
So, what do you mean by that, Mary?
Do you mean do you want to see samples of what they look like and what the data looks like? We do have sample messages and certainly if you want to talk to me directly, I can contact you and we can have a chat about it and I can clarify a bit more about what you want to see. But there are, we definitely do have a number of resources for you
to look at.

Okay, so Samir.

I'm actually on the sorry.

There you go, Lise.

Just going to say that actually on the same page on our website where our business guide is located, there's a link underneath that that's technical self-service. And so that's just a little interactive, basic, I must say, spreadsheet.
So, essentially, one side of the screen is what your classic invoice might look like, very, very, very basic, but then if you click on all of those key fields on the invoice on the right-hand side, it will is the actual invoice message or the XML that was.
created from that invoice. And when you click on the key field on the left hand side on the invoice, it will take you to the actual field that's being updated on the right hand side. So that might be quite useful for you to have a look at as well, so you can get some comfort as to what actually is going on there.
But totally happy to discuss one-on-one.

Simon.
I just need to acknowledge it's 5 to 12. I think we'll keep going for another 5 minutes or so, if that's alright, Lise. We've got about four questions left. So I don't know if you've got it on screen, but there's a question from Lana Lang. I'll read it out. So hi, are you aware if the incoming eInvoices can come into the ERP through the access point?

Of course.

but then go through or link to the OCR as well. So not necessarily having to manage incoming eInvoices using one of the other channel. So the existing rules behind, so the existing rules already built in the OCR for recognising POs and vendor accounts can read eInvoices too. Bit to take in there.

Short answer is yes.

Lise.

I think, I mean, you'd be best to talk to your access point provider, but as to how they technically get that to work. But I think maybe we're talking here about an OCR provider's service of a plug and play kind of thing that the invoice comes in.
by OCR to a point and then an eInvoice document is created in your FMIS to match that. I think that's what we're talking about here.

Thanks, Lise. I'm going to answer the next question from David Bullenhoven. Hi, we use the contracts module and technology one for progress payments. How does this work with eInvoicing? I can't answer that specifically, but I know that a number of government agencies who use the tech one contracts module have configured it. David, if you want to configure it, get in touch with us and we will connect you with the people who have done it

Mm.

and they can give you the answer. So just send us an e-mail at eInvoicing@mbie.govt.nz and we'll connect you with some details for you.

Yeah.
Absolutely.

Okay, next question, George Smith. If a supplier sends through an eInvoice that requires updating, does the supplier need to send through a new updated invoice or are they able to amend it while it's draft your system? Over to you, Lise.

Okay, so my first answer would be it does depend on their software. So if you're a Xero supplier, then you can only send an invoice as an eInvoice once. So Xero knows once you've first sent it as an eInvoice and then that option is greyed out to be able to resend it. So
whilst the sender might be able to go in and edit the invoice, they won't be able to resend as an einvoice will have to be sent as a PDF by e-mail, I suppose.

I'll just jump on here, Lise. Yeah, I guess it's maybe the simplest way is that if it needs to, if you need an updated invoice, you would ask them to send a completely new einvoice with a different invoice number so that it's not duplicated

You say, well, it's draft, yeah.
Mm.

which would probably mean that you would have to send through a credit as well, just to offset the original invoice that didn't have all the information is an option.

Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah, that's right. That's one of those tricky little side processes that are really important to nut out in your planning stage. They re the sorts of things that trip you up. Yeah.
But absolutely happy to talk more about that with some real
and some real one data, I suppose, for a real example.

Okie dokie, we've got two more questions. I'm just going to do Stephen's first because it's a quick one. Stephen joined late and he's asking how to go about setting up an access point receiver or provider. Is there one already set up we can use or do we need to arrange this? So some information was shared previously in the chat. So I'm not too sure if you're a government department, Stephen, but there is a

Yeah.

the government panel of access point providers, but our website has details of all 40 accredited access point providers. And if you need any further information, again, you can contact us directly. And then I think the last question before we wrap up is from Christina Martin. Now, that's a bit of a handful, but
Lise, I don't know if you've read it yet, but essentially she's asking if we could make purchase order numbers a mandatory field for eInvoices. She's asking that because it would significantly reduce the time spent by the team going back and forth to get invoices reissued between other government departments. Have you had a read of that yet, Lise?

Um...
some of it.
Yeah, and yeah, these references and particularly purchase order references can be pretty tricky. Probably my short response to that would be we do have
we do have a other agencies that are live with receiving eInvoices that are PO shops, so no PO, no pay
and they do, I think, reject the gateway based on a couple of checks. So essentially, if there's no purchase order number coming through in that field, their access point provider might reject it, but then they also will send a message back to the
the supplier to say, hey, your invoice has been rejected for this reason. And so these are, we don't love the option of rejecting at the gateway. I think really the only time that we view rejecting at the gateway as an acceptable
way to go is when it's already supported by your communications with your suppliers or your terms of trade as it is like, you know, when you engage that supplier, they know straight off from the beginning that you, it's a no PO, no pay situation.
The other thing, the other option we see agencies doing is not rejecting and letting everything through, but then someone goes through the queue that's got all the invoices that don't have POs attached to them, and it's a case of re-educating the supplier 1 by 1 to actually
Please only send us an invoice if it's got a purchase order number on it.

Can I also add in here, Lise? Kristyn was suggesting making purchase orders as a mandatory field. It's probably important to point out there are a number of businesses and government agencies that don't require a purchase order. They might want a cost centre number

Yep.
Yeah, that's true.
Yeah.

and so they don't actually use purchase orders, or they might have a mixture of some items of purchase orders and some items are not. So yeah, so it wouldn't work in that situation.

Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah, and so just to touch a little bit more on the references, as per the PEPPOL specification, one or both of the, it's mandatory to either send a buyer reference or a purchase order reference. So you don't have to send both. You can send both, but you can't send none. So
from that perspective, one of those references has to come through anyway. But from a perspective of making it mandatory, that's probably an agency by agency situation because it's just, yeah, there are a lot of invoices that go through that don't have purchase orders on them for
or other agencies, so we can't just make one blanket rule for everybody. That said, Andrew and I particularly have been doing a lot of work around standardisation and what that might look like. It s a very big topic. And we've recently
the team have upsized that invoice reference requirements spreadsheet to I think about 100 and 110 is it 120 something like that. And that lists every single government agency s reference requirements, whether it's a buyer reference or a PO reference or both.
And if you look at that sheet, everybody does things a little bit differently. And so trying to find a clear path in the middle of all that is, it's quite something.

We ve come to the end of the questions now.

Oh, I totally must have talked too much.
Maybe everyone's gone to sleep after having to listen to me for a while.

Well, there's still 81 people online, so you can't be doing half bad, but I'm getting hungry, so I think we should call it.

Okay.
Bye.
Yeah, and like I said earlier, if there's any questions that you have, please just e-mail us and we'll come back to you as soon as possible.

Bye

Well, thank you everyone for joining us. We will look forward to seeing you at the next webinar being held. Have a great day.

Good morning, everyone, and thanks for joining us at this webinar around send capability. We'll just wait a few minutes for everyone to log in.
If you've just joined us, we're just going to wait a couple more minutes for people to join into the webinar.
We'll just give it a couple more minutes.
Okay, well, the...
the people dialling in has slowed down now, so let's get started.
Good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us today, and welcome to this webinar during which we'll talk about implementation of eInvoicing Send Capability. My name is Lise Archbold. I'm the implementation manager on the eInvoicing team here. And if you ever have any technical type of queries,
I'm generally the person you'll speak with.
So now for a bit of housekeeping, we'll send out a copy of the presentation after the webinar. So this will contain links of relevance that I mentioned through the webinar and Alison, our adoption advisor, will be pasting into the chat throughout the webinar also. We're also recording the webinar. It'll be saved on our website and we'll share a link with you in about two weeks.
The core presentation is around 30 minutes, maybe a bit longer, and the remainder of the time will be to work through your questions. And if your questions do remain unanswered at the end of the webinar, then please redirect them to eInvoicing@mbie.govt.nz
And I will just say around questions as well that please could you use the Q&A function rather than the chat? That's much as much easier for us to see your questions and we're just looking at one area of the webinar rather than both. So please use the Q&A, not the chat. We'll be putting a few online polls towards the end of the webinar
and once again, Alison will drop a link in the chat for you closer to the time. And lastly, many of you who joined us today are from local government organisations. This webinar is more targeted towards you, but then also suppliers to government in general, and the content's very relevant
for all of you. I also see some of you have joined us from the private sector. I'd like to think that you'll all get something out of this webinar.
Right, so let's move on and hand over to my colleague, Linda, who is going to go through the MBIE Karakia. Thanks, Linda.

Thank you, Linda. Right, so if we could move over to the agenda, please, on the next slide. So here's what we'll cover today. In November, we ran a webinar that covered eInvoice send capability at a higher level. Today's session s a follow on from this and will involve us diving a bit deeper into the technical side of implementation.
We'll also cover the resources we have available and some pro tips that we've picked up along the way. I should say that the content we're covering assumes that audience is already on the journey, whether it's planning or whether it's testing or going live or whatever. So hoping that the content won't be completely foreign to any of you.
I'd also like to note that many of the attendees here today also attended our webinar on eInvoice receive capability last week. So just wanted to say in advance that you'll probably note some duplication of content in some areas, but there's also important send specific content being covered as well.
Okay, so just to give background on the eInvoicing team's role in PEPPOL, we essentially are the New Zealand PEPPOL Authority and which sits within MBIE. We have a small team, but we cover many aspects such as the PEPPOL standards, specifications,
stakeholder engagement and the technical and non-technical side of how to implement eInvoicing. We work closely with the Australian PEPPOL Authority, which is inside the Australian Tax Office, and we share the Australia/New Zealand PEPPOL standard amongst other functions. For example, we have a mutual accreditation programme for access point providers.
All right, next slide, please.
So I'm going to start off with talking about the eInvoicing Business Guide first. This was written by us and in conjunction with the ATO, Australian Tax Office, sorry. And really just documenting our experiences and
and some how-to information around implementations after having learned a lot of lessons from about 60 or so government eInvoicing implementations. We also had some valuable input from some of the champions for eInvoicing in some of the government agencies and also some industry specialists.
Most things you'll need to know are covered clearly in this document and it's written to cover a wide range of readers. So whether you are a technical person working on the technical side of the project, whether you are a project sponsor, whether you're a user, it should all be relevant and it's written to apply to everybody.
And you can lean on other resources available from MBIE as well, your provider and other agencies. There will be links to our resources as we move through the webinar and Alison will add these links in the chat. Thank you, Alison.
So, next slide, please.
So, what is PEPPOL? PEPPOL eInvoicing is a digital exchange of invoice information directly between suppliers and buyers financial systems. This transfer is made possible by the sender and receiver, each having eInvoice enabled software and an access point provider or two in the middle to transmit,
using the common PEPPOL standard. So let's just touch on the NZBN first. The essential requirement for both suppliers and buyers is that both parties need to capture in their respective systems the other's NZBN. So the supplier's customer record must
must hold the customer's NZBN, and the buyer's supplier must record must hold the supplier's NZBN. And that's because the NZBN is the key identifier that enables the different systems to recognise each other as the correct buyer or supplier. And in the eInvoicing environment, it effectively replaces the role that an email address played when
sending PDF Invoices. Right, so how it works in practice, the data flows through the four corner model like this. You'll see in my diagram, we've got these little pictures labelled C1 through to C4. So C1 means corner one, and that's the supplier s
billing system or financial management information software. So the supplier system creates the invoice and that has to include the supplier's NZBN and the buyer's NZBN. Because we need to know who the buyer is and how the network is going to identify that buyer.
So under the old PDF email model, the invoice was delivered via an email address. With eInvoicing, it relies entirely on the NZBN, so including it is absolutely essential.
Then once prepared, the invoice is passed from corner one to the supplier's access point provider, which is corner two. The supplier's access point provider receives the eInvoice, does its initial checks, such as verifying all of the mandatory PEPPOL fields, such as supplier and buyers MBN
NZBN, sorry, and then looks up the NZBN for the buyer on the PEPPOL network. So, so this is why the NZBN also is so important, and then the look up checks that the buyer is registered, and then if they are, to make sure that they are able to receive eInvoices, and then also...
identifies who the access point provider is that looks after that buyer. If all these conditions are met, then the access point provider for the supplier sends it off to the corner three, which is the buyer's access point provider. So they're the access point provider that is actually acting for the buyer. So they go through and perform all their further checks and they revalidate
the eInvoices coming through, just to make sure again that it aligns with the PEPPOL standard, and then it applies any data transformation rules that have been requested by the buyer. And then, and then at that point, if all is well, then then the corner three, the access point provider for the buyer,
sends off the invoice to the buyer s financial management software, which is the corner 4. When the eInvoice arrives at the corner 4, it typically passes through a processing queue in the FMIS, just always, there are so many different systems, the actual workflow
differs system to system, but generally that's how it works, it turns up in a processing queue first. And the 1st and most important match performed is on the NZBN.
If the buyer has the supplier s NZBN stored correctly in their supply records, then the invoice can be automatically assigned to the correct supplier account. From there, the system performs additional validation, such as checking references. If all of the required information is present, the invoice can progress through the buyer's internal workflow,
potentially all the way to approval and payment, depending on which FMIS is being used and how it has been configured. And as I said, the workflows will vary much between systems, but the correct NZBN matching is the fundamental part to making automation possible. The access point providers, as I mentioned,
with respect to data transformation services, they offer a number of services in that sort of in that corner two, corner three, corner four area, and we'll cover that a bit more soon when we talk a little bit about messaging. Okay, next slide, please.
So there are three distinct parts to a successful implementation. There's the software piece, the eInvoicing connexion piece, and the business process trading partner onboarding piece. We'll cover each of these in more detail on the next slides. Could we go to the next slide, please?
The first step is to confirm the software that will send your eInvoices. So you may use a few different types of software for your billing, especially the larger suppliers. And we see it quite often with larger businesses that have acquired other businesses along the way that they end up with using different software for different things.
So it's worth noting that the NZ government procurement rules have recently been upsized to include councils and wider government. And I know that we have a number of representatives from both of those today, both of those sectors today. And then along with this, as of January next year,
there'll be a requirement for government agencies to request eInvoices from their large suppliers as well. And I'm guessing that's also why some of you are here. The business guide contains detailed information about ways of implementing eInvoicing, but the key is that the government procurement rules refer to your primary system. So that's the main system
from which you send your customer invoices through now. And when we think about software send capability, eInvoicing works best in your natural business software. And by this, we mean your billing or your finance systems, your ERPs, mail houses. It's really just another channel that sits alongside your
existing channels. And with respect to mail houses, I just thought I'd call this out. We've seen some quite interesting, good ways of onboarding their customers, essentially, it's around opting in or opting out. So Bunnings, for example, when they went live a year or so ago, they
basically, they registered all of their customers who were registered on the network already, and then they let their customers know when they, if they didn't want to be receiving eInvoices from them. And then we've seen other ones, other implementations where they've done an opt-in situation where people
have to, all companies have to make contact with them to opt in. Right, next slide please.
So this one is about connecting to the PEPPOL network and it's really how your software is going to get into that PEPPOL network.
And really here, we're talking about two aspects. So we are first talking about whether your software already has functionality to create and send eInvoices, as well as whether the software can directly connect to the PEPPOL network. I mentioned access points earlier in corner two and corner three
So, um...
so some software has an inbuilt access point, a few of them do at least, many don't, but this is the difference between a system that where you don't necessarily need to engage an access point provider to send. And for example, the
software that I would mention right now that has that has the inbuilt access point system such as SAP and Xero MYOB. They essentially have an access point working in behind the scenes.
And so it's one of the first things to check whether that's the case and or whether you need to engage an access point. And so we've got so many systems around which are already capable of sending eInvoices. If I just list a handful, and particularly ones that government are using, technology one,
Oracle Fusion, Microsoft Business Central, SAP, Xero, MYOB, Magic, they're all capable. And if you're not sure, just contact your provider and find out. We also have a list of eInvoicing capable software products on our website,
and the link is there on the slide and Alison will add it to the chat too. If your software isn't capable, then there are still options available to you. For example, your mail house provider may have a plug and play option or an access point provider may also be able to help. We're also aware that some of you may have your own purpose-built EAPs, in which case
you're probably going to have to invest in having that eInvoicing functionality added. So the next thing to consider is how your software is going to connect to the network. And I have touched on it a little already, but what I would say is that we have a list on our website of all of the
access point providers and also  . and all of these all of these access point providers are accredited with the New Zealand and Australian PEPPOL Authorities and the link to that has been posted in the chat.
And if you're a government agency and you need the services of an access point provider, then there's a government syndicated panel in place with seven providers to choose from. MBIE has done the procurement on your behalf, so you don't need to run a full process of procurement. And all of these panel providers have done many successful implementations.
If you haven't already, go to the NZ Government Procurement website for detail about the open agreement and to check what the process is for requesting the buyer's guide. Generally, you start by emailing the Commercial Services Desk and it will involve signing an NDA. Alison will post a link
in the chat to our list of, sorry, to our list of panel providers on our New Zealand Government procurement website.
Okay, could we go to the next slide, please?
So the next piece is about business process, change management, customer onboarding areas, which all kind of fit together quite nicely. The transition from emailing your PDFs to sending eInvoices is going to take some time and we have to be realistic about that. And the speed at which this happens is really up to you and depends on the rate on how
you can, how quickly you can transition your customers to this channel. It also of course is about what the enablement is of your receiving customers. So if we talk about business process first, this is all about reviewing your current processes and consider those that will need to need to change to accommodate eInvoicing.
We've seen that the most successful implementations where the processes are adapted to wrap around eInvoicing rather than the other way around. These might be business processes or they might come about due to workflow changes in your system when eInvoicing, the eInvoicing channels added
but I must say, it's a great opportunity to look at ways to find efficiencies and flush out processes that may have become troublesome or obsolete for your business. For example, emailing PDFs to the buyer contacts. eInvoicing has one endpoint and doesn't fall over if people go on holiday or leave. So the invoices are going straight to your customer system and it's a really key difference and it's a really good one.
So on this, we've seen considerable value in suppliers and customers getting together to talk about the specifics of all their billing scenarios in the form of workshops and that sort of thing. These discussions tend to unearth a few tricky little processes that
seem to just go on behind the scenes and a lot of people don't know about. And if left unchecked, then they have the potential to derail the efficiencies that you're going to get from eInvoicing. There's of course the classic one that I alluded to above, buyers requesting that they receive the emailed invoice directly. I've even heard of cases where the
supplier is asked to send the invoice to multiple recipients and the poor finance teams are the last to know about the invoice. This can add days or even weeks to processing times. And the other one that we've commonly seen is staff ordering goods or services and then they get the invoice directly to them.
And then they go, oops, I was supposed to give a purchase order for that. So then the contact with the supplier, supplier has to then regenerate the invoice, either credit it or amend it and resend it with the purchase order number on it. In a blue sky scenario, the purchase order would be provided at the time of ordering so that it could be included on the invoice the first time and then potentially
with the purchase order and options around automation and systems, you know, it could enable the receipt three-way matching automation kind of process, which is really worthwhile and it could cut down a lot of time.
So in the end, these discussions will just provide you with richer information for which to go ahead with when mapping your processes and to see how they'll look under eInvoicing. So change management, some of us will say this is the hardest part because this is the people part really. So everyone responds to change differently and we strongly recommend
stressing to your users that eInvoicing is just another channel. There may be a few changes to everyday tasks, but over time, everyone will see the benefits. Less chasing payments for invoices, that kind of thing. This is something that takes time to address, but it can be managed with the appropriate training and preparation of user guides. It really does get easier with time, just like anything.
All right, so it's really important to keep focused and keep motivated on transitioning your customers to eInvoicing. You'll see the benefits much faster if you do. And just try to focus in the beginning with those that have simple reference requirements. What I'd say is there is benefit in sending eInvoices to government agencies.
Partly I say this because they're already eInvoice receive enabled, so they know what to expect when the eInvoices come in, which makes it hopefully easier to onboard them. There's also the added bonus of eInvoices to government agencies having to be paid within five days. So you should see your reward pretty quickly.
And then so to help you along with that, we've developed a list of invoice requirements, invoice reference requirements. So we've gone out to government agencies over the last while. So probably a few years ago, we first developed this, what we
affectionately called the cheat sheet. So this is a list of approximately 30 agencies that are eInvoicing enabled already and the references they want to receive, along with the NZBN numbers and contact emails. And we've recently gone through a task of upsizing the data. So we ll now be including about 110 agencies.
We ll be, we're just tidying it up at the moment and we are soon to publish it on our website. Alison will put the link in the chat for that particular list.
All right. And so something else that we've seen work really well for onboarding, one of our larger customers uses an onboarding questionnaire. So whenever they need to onboard a customer to eInvoicing, they first ask them to complete the questionnaire. So
this captures deeper detail around what they expect to be included on the eInvoices. And because the information is being submitted, being submitted is specific to that particular buyer/supplier relationship, it just helps identify any intricacies that may have been missed
and can perhaps be flagged and be encoded in the sending solution.
Right, and then we do have a bunch of resources on our website, but just to call out a couple there. We've got the eInvoicing Change Management Guide, and we have the Communication Toolkit for eInvoice Senders.
Now, could we go to the next slide, please?
So here I'd just like to talk a little bit about the technical components that underpin PEPPOL eInvoicing. I don't want to spend too much time on this because I just want to give you a bit of an idea of how it all works so that you're aware. Essentially, when you receive or send an eInvoice on the PEPPOL network, you have to use
the PINT ANZ specification. So PINT meaning PEPPOL International invoice, ANZ, Australia, New Zealand specification. So as I mentioned earlier, Australia and New Zealand share the same specification. And what it does is it ensures consistency in the way that the invoice data is structured, validated, and exchanged.
And it's mandatory for all of the access point providers I spoke about earlier operating in New Zealand and Australia. Okay, so what does it contain? It's typically the information you'd expect to capture on any invoice when you're creating it. So supplier details, customer details,
invoice number, dates, GST numbers, line items, totals, that kind of thing, and and so those elements are,
transferred through as data through PEPPOL in the same way every time, so that receiving systems can correctly interpret it. And there are about 200 structured data elements and specification, but of that about 25 to 30 are mandatory, and you'll see the list
that I've put in the slide there, but essentially all of the ones that I mentioned just now, and just of course, calling out the NZBN as well. So the supplier NZBN along with the buyer NZBN.
All right, so why does it matter? It's just basically it ensures that sending and receiving systems interpret the data in the same way. And it allows the invoices to move seamlessly between the different software platforms across the PEPPOL network. And so Australia, New Zealand, we're early adopters of this. We went live with this last year.
One of the key things about the update to the specification that we went live with was that it supports international trade seamlessly. And so more jurisdictions worldwide, such as those in Europe and Asia, are catching up as well.
Okay, next slide, please.
So the other semi-technical document that goes hand in hand with the specification is the Industry Practise Statement for Invoice Content. So this was developed by the New Zealand and Australian PEPPOL authorities, as well as the digital service providers of Australia and New Zealand.
So whilst this isn't mandatory to align to this for organisations, the New Zealand panel providers, so those seven access point providers I mentioned earlier, they are required to comply as part of their agreement to be on the panel. It's designed to be a practical, user-friendly resource to support organisations implementing
eInvoicing capability.
So if you think about how it fits in with the specification, the specification provides the minimum requirements for interoperability, whereas the idea is that really if you just send the mandatory elements, it doesn't necessarily give medium to large businesses or agencies enough information to efficiently process those eInvoices.
So this industry practise statement offers guidance to software vendors and access point providers to ensure, particularly government buyers, receive the information they need for smooth, automated invoice processing.
And so, within this document, based on feedback that we ve had, we ve grouped these fields based on how commonly buyers have said that they need them and also how important they're considered to be for interoperability in automated processing.
And so we have three the ratings required for interoperability, which is rated as the most important. So most frequently, excuse me, frequently required by buyers, critical for enabling automatic invoice processing and necessary for reliable interoperability across the network. And then we've got the recommended, which
assist with quicker, more efficient processing by buyers and tends to assist with things like three-way matching and POs and receipts and that sort of thing. And once again helps with the,
the straightforward processing between systems. And then there's the conditional. So the conditional, we kind of have at the bottom of the three ratings, just because whilst they do provide much more rich context, there might be
fields that some systems will support but others won't. For example, a purchase order line reference. If someone is a company is buying goods or a government agency is buying goods and their system might require a purchase order line number, but then maybe their
maybe their supplier uses zero and so zero can't support that. So it's
So it's really important to remember that those, whilst those fields are significant, they also have their limitations, given that different software supports different things. And so it's also prudent to, you know, not
for buyers not to expect all of those fields to be provided on their request.
All right. So, if we could go to the next slide, please.
Pro tips and learnings. So we all know, I guess by now, the overall goal of the eInvoicing is faster processing and payment of invoices. And we know that Bunnings Australia have seen seven-fold decrease in transmission failures since implementing eInvoicing and sending eInvoices to their customers.
PEPPOL is a stable channel with very few error rates, invoices not received by customers, unlike the old emailing of PDFs where they can very often get lost, unfortunately. And so the next point I'd like to mention is while the technicalities of the implementation are underway,
we strongly recommend you start collecting NZBNs right now and make it a priority. It's a job that you can just carry on with in the background and just keep working on. And next point would be get the right people on the project team. So make sure you've got a project sponsor, we need someone who's going to own your project and you should have a good mix of
users, the people that are at the coal face and the technical experts, we find that works the best. So purchase orders and buyer references can be a significant challenge. These provide the essential context that tells your customers what each invoice relates to.
It's important to take the time to identify the correct references required for your customer, as I've mentioned earlier, and ensure that your data and processes are mapped so that this information is consistently captured. I also want to reiterate the importance of conducting both data mapping and process mapping.
This is one of the most common areas where organisations experience early eInvoicing issues. So investing the time up front saves effort later. And as mentioned earlier, we strongly recommend a data mapping exercise, and that's particularly important around references.
And this helps confirm that all your necessary data that you're used to sending to your customers and are used to receiving, especially references and notes, will be included and transmitted correctly when the invoices are sent.
And just because, as I mentioned, the different software managers handles the data fields differently with respect to how they're seen in the receiving and sending system. Yeah, don't forget that some customers may not be able to receive certain fields you send, or on the other side, your software might not be able to send data your customer expects to receive.
It's definitely a place for flexibility there. And each product manages fields in its own way, and it can create mismatches. If I use an example of Xero, so on the face of it, if you were creating an invoice in Xero,
it looks like you only have one reference option, so one reference field to enter something in. But actually, Xero, when you can put in particular syntax to be able to map to more than one reference, so you can
sent to your buyer reference as well as your purchase order reference. And Xero has good resources on this on their website and there's a link on the slide and Alison will add a link to the chat. Essentially, it's...
if you want to say your general reference,
you might have put somebody's name or a cost centre number or something like that. Put a comma and then for your purchase order number, you'd put PO colon and then put your purchase order number after that. When the invoice is received by the receiver, then that invoice will have
the cost centre come through into their buyer reference and the purchase order number will land in their order reference. So it's actually quite a good resource and encourage you if you're using Xero or if you even have customers that use Xero, it's a really good thing to know about. So, credit note handling is a
bit of a trick. There are some systems that don't actually support credit notes, ecredit notes. There is a separate technical specification and so some receivers aren't registered on the network to receive credit notes.
So, we we suggest that.
when you are building your sending solution, that you just incorporate the credit notes inside your eInvoice specification. It's already there, all ready to go. You don't necessarily need to go off and use a separate credit note specification. It's essentially, it's created as an invoice, but it's a negative value invoice. It looks almost exactly the same
you've just got negative quantities as opposed to positive, and it works exactly the same way. And the benefit of that also is that when you're sending eInvoices, your system doesn't need to go off and check whether that customer can receive ecredit notes. If you're just sending one type of specification which manages
both scenarios then that s much more simple.
So testing, make sure that you select your test partner so that you have a good cross-section of scenarios to avoid surprises after going live. It's really important. And perhaps we have some organisations here that use EDI to send eInvoices, send invoices, sorry.
This could be a good candidate either now or in the medium term to switch over to eInvoicing. And then once again, just try to get familiar with the industry practise statement for invoice content. So it's not just from a technical point of view, it's actually, it's thinking, it's giving you a view of what the experience looks like when your eInvoice is sent and how it's received.
All right, I promise I'm going to stop talking shortly. So other considerations that shall just briefly touch on. Consolidated Invoices and Utilities Invoices. So with consolidated invoices, we know that a lot of agencies have
specific processes to ingest consolidated invoices, and also for...
organisations sending those consolidated invoices. And at this point, they don't necessarily translate easily into the eInvoicing model. And along with this, if you're in the utility sector, so telecommunications, electricity, that kind of thing, then it's quite likely you'll send information that's additional to your run-of-the-mill invoice. It might be
the sheer size of an invoice. I've seen really big, large phone invoices that might be phone, sorry, phone service invoices that are up to 3000 pages just for a month. And actually, when you look at what's being received, what's being entered by the receiver, they might just be putting a couple of lines in.
because they've got all the detail in another form such as PDF or Excel or they can access it via a portal. And then there's also with those utility type invoices, usually you'll see an opening balance, changes to opening balance and less payments, and then like a new opening balance and then you've got all your other information. So it's kind of a little bit like an invoice statement. And so eInvoicing
doesn't cater to this. It's kind of .eInvoicing is really more about billing for a good or service as you go, like maybe one instance per invoice. And there's so much to think about. And now with the larger suppliers being required to supply to
sorry, just eInvoices to government agencies, by January next year, this subject is really becoming front of mind for us. So, we are getting together with other government agencies and going to survey their requirements and set up some working groups to
work through just how we're going to attack this. And the result basically will be building and documenting suitable models of what these implementations could look like.
Yes, so that's on our work agenda for this year. And then also, yeah, access point providers, they're the experts in implementing. And one of the things that they do is invoice response options. So we talked about invoices being emailed by PDF and
getting lost in someone's inbox or someone's on leave, that kind of thing. Invoicing response for sending is...
available from your access point providers. So you can send an eInvoice and then get a message back to say that it was successful or not. And also at the other end, the buyer's end, they can, the access point provider can send messages back should an invoice be rejected for some reason.
And then they also do some quite cool added value services, things like data transformation, validation, so maybe checking for a purchase order number on the way through or checking for references that might be potentially mapping to the wrong place and remapping them to where that organisation needs them.
And last thing from me, I just wanted to quickly talk about the eInvoicing Community of Practise or what we call the ECOP. So this is the quarterly knowledge sharing and networking meeting for private organisations. We mostly discuss eInvoicing and payment time journeys and because payment time has been sitting with us for a while.
And the ECOP is a useful platform to network, meet people, share notes, and collectively solve problems. It's just, we found it so invaluable for our stakeholders to share and help each other. The next one is on the 19th of March. And if you would like to join us, if you're not already on the invite, then
please email us at the eInvoicing@mbie.govt.nz address to register, please.
Okay, now I am finished. So now's the time to answer your questions. But before we do that, we're going to put a couple of online polls on the screen for you to participate in, please.
All right, so what stage are you at your eInvoicing journey?
Alison is putting a link in the chat for you to attached to this.
Right, lots of people at the investigating stage.
About 50-50 with working through it. So the next question, would you be interested in attending another send webinar later this year, maybe focusing on particular areas?
Right, and so this is a question where you can put your own text in here to
mentioned what particular area you'd like to know more about.
And the last question, did you find this webinar useful?
Right, and it's good to see.
Okay, so now I'm going to open this up to you all and to my wider team to go through questions and answers.

Righto, Lise. Hello, Andrew Cooke here, Government Innovation Manager for the team. So, I'm going to pass the first question to you, Lise. It's from Barry Derwin, and Barry's asking, for the credit note handling, does this include debit notes or other non-invoice related documents?

So debit notes probably would fall into the invoice specification
and non-invoice related documents . What, such as adjustments and that kind of thing?
At this point, there are only...
we can only use the invoice specification.
for
any ..a something owing to an account, so...
Yeah, it would have to be  
I hand my debit notes. Yeah, yeah, that's right. I mean, they would all you could you could get it all managed inside the invoice specification, but feel free, Barry, to contact me separately to talk about specific examples.

Right, have you got the Q&A on screen, Lise?

Yes, I have. So, Katie is the next one.

Yeah, go for it.

Yes, definitely you can manage discounts on an eInvoice. There's this, there are fields in there to cater to all of that.
But it does depend on, I guess, the software that you're using. And so I'm not, I couldn't answer that question right off the top of my head about whether Xero manages discounts or not, but I can take that away and get in touch with you, Katie.
Alright, next question: What happens if the portal is down?
Well, it's not a portal as such. It depends what you mean by a portal, but it's actually a network that just carries the eInvoices through. So .
I've never seen the PEPPOL network go down.

Is it possible? Lise, I'll just...
Yeah, I was just going to ask that. I was going to say, is it possible that the eInvoicing network goes down for some reason and therefore can't pass eInvoices through? Is that  perhaps that's a question? Perhaps that's what he was asking.

Mm.
We've never seen the eInvoicing network go down. I guess it's possible that specific access point providers might go down, but then that's highly unlikely also. But if there was a problem, the access, it's probably more a question for your access point provider to be fair
than me, but the every eInvoice is sent as a message in an XML file, so I guess they would hold on to that message until their network was up again. But there is a  the PEPPOL network can
the PEPPOL SML can go down sometimes, the PEPPOL search function, sorry, can go down sometimes, but there are multiple ways of and that to identify an NZBN for a receiver. So yeah, it's not something that's a big issue at all. But if you want to talk about this more,
please let us know and or talk to your access point provider about it because they will know the answer straight off, I'm sure.
The invoice data isn't stored. It's sent as messages in XML. So they just pass through the network. Once again, it sounds like an access point provider question.
Alright .
We are asked to provide attachments with invoice receipts or specific agency templates. Are these managed in the template or will they need to be seen separately? So there is functionality to attach additional documents, whether it's a simple PDF of an invoice or whether it's a time sheet or something like that. There is definitely
space in there to include attachments and additional data. The specifics, I guess, you'd need to sort out when you're building your solution or talk to your software and service provider.
Next one, is eInvoicing meant to be an enabler for payment times reporting, i.e. data is consistent?
An answer there, Andrew?

Yeah, I'll give it a go. Well, yes and no. I mean, as Lise mentioned earlier on in the presentation, eInvoicing, it's just another channel. It's, yes, there are a number of countries that have adopted eInvoicing as a tax reporting solution, but that's not the path New Zealand is going down. So
essentially, no, but it does mean that you have richer data that gets into your system faster and of course, faster payment as well.

Okay, next.

Andrew, sorry Andrew, I'll just, so I guess the question was around is eInvoicing meant to be an enabler for payment times reporting? So I guess is the answer yes?

Um...
Well, is it an enabler? I mean, not necessarily, because payment time reporting is the data at the end of the system.
So, so no, as I say, it's just another channel.

And we have generally the payment time reporting is already available on your software, regardless of whether it's an eInvoice or not.
Okay, other sorry.

Okay, you go Lise.

Are there any stats about the different eInvoicing enabled software that government agencies are using would help with data mapping and knowing whether the info pass through would actually be surfaced or not surfaced?
We definitely have on our records the different systems that government agencies use. We can talk to you about that separately if you wish.
Okay.
All right, what certification accreditation is done for the access point providers? So we go through an accreditation process, which essentially starts with at the time that the access point provider will apply to be accredited. There are checks such as criminal checks,

This one.
Let's see.

that they have insurance, indemnity insurance, basically that they are who they say they are. And then as well as that, they need to submit a security questionnaire, which is basically a document that lists out all of their security infrastructure.
But as well as that, they generally will have ISO 27001 certification already and that's usually a big part of it. But basically the security questionnaire is when it was received, it's passed on to security team, cyber security team to work through. And
They check down to the Nth degree everything that's provided in there and then go and satisfy directly with the access point providers the questions that they might have. They don't, no one gets accredited until our cybersecurity team are fully satisfied.
Okay, is 24-7 support available .. for what?

Yes, that would be from their access point provider or...
if that's kind of support you're looking for.

Yeah, if you're talking about, yeah, yeah, if you're talking about the access point providers, then I know with respect to the panel providers, for example, those seven

That will be your first call.

the seven panel providers are within their agency agreements. They have
They have their support hours and time frames all set out in that document. So that could be made available to you if you're particularly concerned about a provider.
But they might be all different, but generally they all have processes in place
for anything that might happen?
Is that the end of the questions?

That looks like the last one, Lise.

Yeah.
Is there anybody else? We've got 5 minutes left. Does anybody else have anything that I would like to know? Feel free to speak up should you wish.
No?.
All right, well, it looks like people are dropping off now. So I just want to thank you all for attending this webinar. I hope you found it useful. And we'll be sending out the presentation and
all other supporting information after this.
Thank you so much, everyone.

Kia ora everyone. We'll just wait a minute or two or three as we let people into this webinar today. That's what that beeping sound is letting
in more attendees.

Thank you for joining us. We'll just wait another minute or two to let more people in as they start to join us.
Okay, I think we'll get started. Thanks for your time today and welcome to the supplier onboarding webinar to learn ways to ensure your investment in Invoicing pays off. Let's start with MBIE’s Karakia
Thank you for joining me today to learn about change management activities, but mostly about onboarding your suppliers so you can make your investment in eInvoicing pay off. The more you send and receive eInvoices, the more you and your trading partners reap the benefits that eInvoicing brings.

I see we have attendees from both the private and government sectors on the call, including many councils. So, thanks for joining. My name is Linda More and I am part of the eInvoicing Team here at the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment.
Also joining me today are my colleagues, Andrew Cook and Alison Smith. Now, just for a little bit of housekeeping.

We will send out a copy of this presentation after the webinar. It will contain links of relevance which Alison Smith, our adoption advisor, will be pasting into the chat throughout the webinar.
This webinar is being recorded and it will be saved on our website, which we will share a link with you in two or three weeks.

The core presentation is about 30 minutes and the remainder of the time will be to work through your questions. If you do have questions that remain unanswered at the end, please redirect them to our email address, which is eInvoicing@mbie.govt.nz
Just a particular note, when you are asking questions, please use the Q&A function, not the chat function. This will help us triage your questions more effectively. Andrew may enter answers to some of these during the session, so do look out for the answers.
Now, before we get started, it will be great to get your answers to a couple of questions. I'll let you share…..
the screen, Andrew, and Alison is putting the link in the chat to this quick poll. Your answers to these will help us in knowing what areas we should put some focus on during this session.
Hopefully, you're able to...
How are those looking, Andrew?

Refreshing to see we've got five, um, that are live and doing it.
Right, so move across to the next one.

Noting, I can't see that screen.

So the next question is, what is your biggest supplier onboarding barrier right now?
Identifying which suppliers are eInvoicing capable seems to be quite common.

OK, good to know, alright.

In fact, the majority……
And the runner up then at this stage, internal change manager training. Very interesting.

Okay, cool. All right, I'm not…….

Thank you for sharing that, everybody.

I might just have to share my screen again. Just excuse me for a moment while I do that.
Okay. All right. Well, there's probably a few of you today that may not be ready to onboard your suppliers, but it will certainly give you some tips on what you can do to get ready for that.
So, it's all very well to have implemented eInvoicing capability, but for you to get the benefits for your organisation, you need to transition your trading partners, in this case your suppliers, from sending PDF invoices to sending you eInvoices. We recommend you allocate time and resource to make this happen.
This could be internally or your access point provider or service provider, for example, your OCR provider may be able to offer these services. To be successful in getting suppliers on board also means you need to get your people on board. By onboarding suppliers, you're increasing the likelihood that they will send eInvoices to other organisations.
Thus embedding eInvoicing into our economy.
To be successful in supplier onboarding means you need to get your people on board. So change management is key to being successful. Identify who your change leaders are early on and make use of the MBIE resources to guide you. So Alison would have put some links into a change management guide and a supplier communications
toolkit. So these have both been developed after years of learning, working with government. They help you get a running start. So I recommend you download these useful resources. Alison has put the links to these in the chat. We've also developed a simpler
supplier onboarding guide, which has specific messages relevant to government agencies. So that includes councils. So it may not be relevant for private organisations in the private sector, but it will still give you some tips on communicating with your
different groups of suppliers. So for this specific one for government agencies, it includes messages about paying eInvoices within five days and the expectation that large suppliers must send to government agencies from January 2027. So this is more of a no frills guide and it's best used to get a few quick wins on board.
We haven't published this on our websites, but we will email this out to you along with this presentation. What's also really important is having strong and visible sponsorship and leadership from within your organisation. So identify and empower your champions early on.
Our observation is that organisations with champions have been more successful today than those without. So really important.
I'll now cover off some of what the changes could be for your people. Although some of what we're proposing is really reasonably simple, we know that even the smallest changes can meet resistance from some of your people. So, the basic premise of eInvoicing is data is received directly into your finance system.
PDF invoices will not be emailed or posted, so your people will need to get used to not receiving an email with a PDF invoice, and they should learn how to identify invoice data in your finance system.
Note that you can receive PDF attachments with your eInvoice. They can be sent through the eInvoicing network along with the data for the invoice itself, but it won't be emailed to your people.
Some invoice data in your finance system may look different and may be in a different place or presented differently.
The other thing to point out is that receiving an eInvoice doesn't mean it's automatically approved. eInvoicing is just another delivery mechanism for transmission and receipt of your invoices. So your approval and processing
processes won't change.
The experience for your suppliers when sending eInvoices may differ as well, depending on the software that they use. So, for example, a supplier using Xero will have a different experience than one that uses Technology One. So, analysing your supplier base will
be important and we'll provide some tips on how to analyse your suppliers later.
Alison previously shared links to the change management guide and the supplier onboarding guide. They both contain checklists and sample communication material, so you don't need to reinvent the wheel. The sample checklist on the screen is probably a little bit hard to read. However, I recommend checking out these pre-change tasks.
For example, getting your supplier master data in order, doing supplier analysis to identify quick wins, preparing your internal communications, updating your finance operational guides, and collecting and validating your suppliers' NZBNs.
This is something we've said in other webinars about NZBN data and we'll continue to emphasise it. It's something you can do regardless of where your organisation is at on their eInvoicing journey. And it's just good data hygiene practise to have your supply master data in good order.
So there's some things that are really helpful, so I do recommend you download these guides.
As I mentioned earlier, getting your people on board is key. So please focus on communicating with your people. Promote or raise awareness of your organisation's preference to receive and maybe send eInvoices too. You know, have you used leadership forums to do this? Intranet news articles.
Email communications to your coders, approvers, and requisitioners have drop-in sessions, and please be free to share the MBIE resources, including the webinar recordings.
Next, I'll move on to supplier onboarding.
There are three supplier groups that can provide you with some quick wins. Suppliers already sending to other government agencies, suppliers who are using Xero or MYOB, and suppliers who are already registered to receive eInvoices. I'll talk through each of these separately. To benefit
from these quick wins means, you'll not likely need a data analyst or an Excel guru. They're best suited to comparing data sets by generating a list of your suppliers with their NZBN remittance email address
and invoice volumes, and then match your own list to the resources that we can provide. I'll share more on these data sets shortly.
Your service provider, OCR provider or invoice scanning provider may also be able to assist with some of this analysis and subsequent onboarding activities. But first I'll talk about the information you should provide to your suppliers, which is generally covered in the communication toolkit, but I'll
cover it briefly here.
So regardless of which group of suppliers you engage with, it's important that you provide them with your NZBN. Remember, it's your NZBN that makes sure that the invoices they send you reach you and get into your finance system.
The other thing you should provide them is your invoice reference requirements. So if you need purchase orders or buyers reference information, then you need to provide that to them as well. It's a good opportunity to remind your suppliers what information you need on an invoice 
when you communicate with them about eInvoicing.
Now note the invoice reference requirements guide may be useful for some government agencies to provide to their suppliers when sending eInvoices for the first time, so they can see what other government agencies may require. So remember, you can provide your suppliers with guidance material,
like that specific to Xero or MYOB. So just keep that in mind when you're thinking about the information you'll need to provide to your suppliers. Right.
First of all, let's talk about those suppliers that are already sending to government agencies. They may also be your suppliers. You might not be a government agency, you may be a private organisation and some of these suppliers might be sending to you.
So we collate a list of these suppliers and we publish it on the eInvoicing website and we update it at least quarterly. There are approximately 600 suppliers on the list. And those from government agencies may recall we ask you to provide your list of suppliers sending you eInvoices as part of the quarterly payment survey.
So the great thing about this group of suppliers is that you don't need to educate them on what eInvoicing is or how to send eInvoices because they're already doing this. So we've developed an email template tailored for this group that you can pick up and use straight away.
Next are the suppliers who use Xero or MYOB platforms. So eInvoicing capability is native for those using those two platforms. So it's already built into their accounting package and there's no extra cost to them. So it's all part of the subscription. So it's very easy for them to switch to eInvoicing
and send you eInvoices today. We've heard time and time again from businesses that this is a good way to get runs on the board and provide confidence to your internal teams. We've also heard many instances of where Xero users will just start sending you eInvoices as soon as you're live
without telling you that they will do so.
This is because the user interface for invoicing will let Xero users know if their customers can receive eInvoices.
So it's relatively easy to identify those suppliers that use these platforms in your accounts payable inbox, presuming you have a centralised inbox. We've found that about 10 to 20% of invoices received by government agencies are from Xero or MYOB users
and it's significantly more for councils who transact with local businesses.
We have a how-to-guide that allows you to search Outlook for organisations using Xero and MYOB, and Alison has put this in the chat.
So as well as Xero and MYOB having their own online help services, we've also developed step-by-step guides for each platform, again, which Alison would have pasted into the webinar chat. So you can link to or download and attach the relevant “Get Started” guide
to the email that you send to those suppliers.
These guides are also really useful for your accounts payable people. It gives them an understanding of the customer experience for those suppliers using Xero or MYOB. And again, we've developed an email template tailored for this group.
You can use the remittance advice email address to contact these suppliers. Also consider having, do an outbound follow-up calling to get commitment from the supplier to act on sending their next invoice as an eInvoice.
There's been a couple of government agencies that have done this with success, for example, Treasury and MBIE.
There's something to watch out for suppliers who do use Xero. As already mentioned, Xero users can send eInvoices today and it's free of charge. If you require your suppliers to include purchase order numbers on invoices, then you need to understand how Xero's reference field
works and what your suppliers need to do to ensure the purchase order is mapped to the right place in your finance system.
If Xero users don't put the correct prefix, then it may be mapped to the wrong place in your finance system. Xero offers guidance and online help for this, and Alison would have put the link to this in the chat. Essentially, your suppliers need to prefix the relevant reference before adding the reference number.
For example, if you require a contract number, you will ask your supplier to put prefix the number with CN colon. Or if it's a purchase order, then prefix with PO colon.
So your suppliers are human, so it's possible that despite you providing them instructions, they still might get it wrong. So you may want to consider implementing business rules to map the purchase orders to the right place in your finance system. This is something Lise Archbold outlined in last week's implementing eInvoicing Receive Capability webinar.
So if you want to learn more, the recording will be available on our website in March. So just to watch out there, something for you to be aware of.
Right, the next quick win, those suppliers already registered to receive eInvoices. So this is one of the number one questions we get as well, is “How do I know which of my trading partners can send or receive eInvoices?” Not always, but if they're registered to receive, then they're highly likely to be able to send as well.
Again, they're more likely to have a bit of an understanding of what eInvoicing is, so you're not having to educate them. And there’s more than 50,000 businesses who are registered and growing each month. And remember that thousands of businesses, thousands of more businesses have access to eInvoicing ready capable software
products now. So there’s now 64 other software providers, products out there that have eInvoicing capability.
Now we publish this list of registered businesses on our eInvoicing website each month. It contains the legal name of the business as specified in the NZBN directory and the NZBN number.
The columns have filters for region and sector. So if you just want to see which businesses are registered for eInvoicing in your region, you can filter by that. And then you can match them to your own list. Again, we've developed an email template tailored for this group.
So really three easy groups that should give you some quick wins.
Yeah, not a quick win, but real productivity gains come with volumes, but dealing with large suppliers tend to be also more complex. They're like a large ship that takes time to turn around compared to smaller ships, i.e. the Xeros and the MYOBs.
who are much more nimble to change direction. We recommend that you let all your suppliers know that your preference is for you to them to switch to eInvoices and that you prefer to receive eInvoices. And then consider engaging with maybe one or two key high volume suppliers to start with.
In some cases, you may need to re-engineer your business processes, depending on how you capture and process invoice data from significant suppliers like telcos, who have a large volume of transaction information.
We can connect you with key contacts at various organisations, including government agencies for testing and/or liaising for onboarding. So I recommend that you test, learn, adapt, and move on to your next large supplier.
We have some templates, template emails tailored for large suppliers that government agencies can use. Those government agencies who must require these large suppliers to send eInvoices under the government procurement rules.
So as well as general direct communications to your suppliers, there are also lots of other supplier touch points that can be used to promote that your preference is to receive eInvoices from them. Just a little bit of a side note, the language we recommend you use in your communications is “we prefer”.
”This will be our standard practise going forward”
Try and avoid using wishy-washy language like, oh, “like if you're interested”, be really strong about what your preference is and what your desired future state looks like.
Now, in your instructions to your suppliers, provide them with your NZBN. When someone asks you to, when you ask someone to email them, email you, you provide them with your email address, right? So when you ask them to send you an eInvoice, provide them with your NZBN. They need to know
how, where it's going to be delivered to. Now remittance and purchase orders advices, they usually go to the accounts people of your suppliers, the very same ones that usually send invoices on behalf of their organisation. So they are the best ones to convert to eInvoicing.
Get your new suppliers sending eInvoices from the get-go so it just becomes the standard. So ensure your new supplier onboarding material is updated and your people are also ready for this.
We have an eInvoicing capable badge that you can download and add that into your email signatures for your accounts payable people or other relevant finance supplier accounts people in your organisation. You can also add some rules to your centralised inbox
that can send an auto response to those that send Xero or MYOB PDF invoices. We've got some tips on that in the communications toolkit.
Another touch point is when suppliers are querying about where their payment is, they might have a centralised accounts payable queries inbox and they're saying, hey, where's my payment? And they’ve probably sent PDFs. So it's an opportunity to let them know if
they send invoices, they won't be lost within your organisation. They've gone straight into your finance system and therefore they're much cleaner and likely to be paid faster. So use every touch point that you can. Repetition and consistency really helps drive the message to your suppliers.
Right, we're nearly there at that time for questions. Before that, let's just talk about two quarterly forums that we run that you may be interested in participating in, depending on whether you're from the private sector or in government.
So the eInvoicing Community of Practice, or ECOP as we call it, is for the private sector. And the Procure to Pay Community of Practice, P2PCOP, is for government.
Both forums are for knowledge sharing and networking for attendees and financial operational type roles, and we mostly talk about eInvoicing journeys in the ECOP, but we also discuss other digital initiatives of relevance. The P2PCOP also includes discussions about payment times.
Both forums are really useful for collectively solving problems.
The next ECOP is the 19th of March and the next P2PCOP is on the 31st of March, which may be of interest to councils who have already started their prompt payment and eInvoicing journeys. Please email us if you'd like to attend either of these forums. And now it's time for your questions.
So remember, just use the Q&A function for your questions, not the chat function. And again, if we've run out of time, you can email our team with your questions. Hopefully, you're suitably equipped to get suppliers to send you eInvoices. And if you have other successful
approaches that we haven't talked today about today, we'd love to hear from you.
I'm going to stop sharing now and we will begin with the questions.

Linda, Andrew here. No questions yet. So there's about 107 of you out there. So come on. I mean, Linda's presentation was great, but you must have some questions. So fire away, please.
Otherwise, we'll be sitting here in awkward silence, making small talk with each other.

Yeah, yeah.
I mean, I could start filling the gap a little bit. One thing we didn't talk about a lot in this webinar is about the large end of town when you've got more complex, larger suppliers. They send lots of volume, but by the nature of their business, they're usually more complex. So we will consider thinking about how we have
whether we have a webinar, just focusing on what are some ways to help get those suppliers on board. So yeah, a bit of a watch out for that.
Um...
Yeah. Gosh, no questions. I'm interested.

Well, that could very well be a compliment, Linda, because we've had a lot of questions on previous webinars, but maybe that indicates that what you provided is so comprehensive and everyone listening has got enough takeaways to consider. Oh, we have a post. Let's have a look. Yay.

Mm.
Check instead of

Linda, have you got the questions in front of you? We've got two questions.

Have we?  Ohh…...

So, Suzanne McGuinness, what has been the experience of agencies that are already receiving eInvoices that end both a PDF?
And an eInvoice.
So, I'm...

Okay, you go.

Yeah, I was going to say, so in some cases, and just hopefully I'm interpreting this question correctly, but in some cases, there's suppliers that send eInvoices and then sometimes back to PDF invoices via email, or sometimes they do both. And that can cause a little bit of friction with your AP team in terms of duplication of effort.
Usually, there's controls in place to ensure these things don't get through, but, and so this comes down to the change management piece, really. It's, I don't know, Linda, anything further to add on that one?

Yeah, you're right. So again, this is your people who deal with the suppliers directly and they go. Oh, send me a PDF because I want to see what it says. And in the meantime, an eInvoice has turned up in the finance system. And Andrew's right, if you're
the people in your organisation also send on that PDF to AP team it ends up being duplicated. One thing you could say to your suppliers is if they...
We shouldn't really encourage this, but they could add on when they email a PDF to their contact within the organisation as to say, this has already been sent as an eInvoice, you know, or label it that way to do that. But it's, yeah, we do want, you do want to start
getting your people used to not receiving a PDF via e-mail and reassure them that they will be able to see the eInvoice in the finance system. So, you know, and it won't get approved until somebody within the business unit has approved it. So, yeah, it's...
it results in duplicate invoices for your finance team, so it's not great practice.
Now, Katie has asked, what are the dates of the ECOP and PCOP? So the 19th of March is the ECOP and the 31st of March is the P2PCOP.

The next one from Vicki-Lee McCoy is a tricky one to answer actually. How do you deal with suppliers that do consolidated invoices with multiple purchase orders referenced on them?
Interestingly, we're about to establish a working group to look at exactly this sort of thing, because it can be quite complicated because these things often require business process change, which means there's often multiple stakeholders within an organisation you need to get across the line.

Mhm.

Which takes effort, and sometimes there can be conflict, so...
There's no short answer to this one.

Short answer is we don't have, yeah, we don't we don't have the answers on that one, but please watch this space. We are, you know, we are, we are, it's on our work program. Yeah. Fiona has asked, I believe there's a list of large suppliers coming from NZGP info from IRD to support identification.

No.
Yeah.
It absolutely is.

No, unfortunately, no, there isn't. Sorry, Fiona. We haven't been able to obtain a list from IRD of which suppliers fit into that criteria to send eInvoices to government from January next year. But Andrew has another plan.
Another way.

A cunning plan. So, of course, the Companies Office is part of MBIE, and it came to our attention that they actually had the reporting criteria or the fields available, and we have actually captured what we believe is quite a reliable view of that data, Fiona. So, and probably the next quarterly
government payment times survey, I'm looking to collect the top supplier list from each agency, like top 100, or maybe more, consolidate that, and then reference that, and then send it back to you so that you have a list. So that's the plan, but it's months away.

Yeah.
Yeah, so again, a work in progress, but feel free to do some of your own internal work to see if there are, to figure out if you probably have a good guess on who are your large suppliers that fit into that category. Peter has asked, are there any councils out there sending invoices via PEPPOL?

Yeah.

Which is the PEPPOL eInvoicing Network that we use……..Andrew?

Short answer is no, Peter, and hi Peter, it's been a while, we should catch up. Short answer, no. The reason being is most types of invoices that councils send have quite unique and specific reference requirements, and a lot of them are driven by
regulations of sorts. So we're looking for pilot councils at the moment, but what we're finding is with councils on the other side of things, they're really the ones who are, but most of their traffic is actually from MYOB and Xero users, and so the prize for them initially is on receiving eInvoices.
But I'm meeting a large council next week, actually, to discuss sending eInvoices, so hopefully we'll get someone across the line soon, Peter.

The next question we have is from Joe. Not sure if we can answer this one. What should we do if our policy is to pay only upon a reconciled statement?

I have no idea how to answer that. I'm sorry.

Mm.
Yeah, I guess, yeah, John, I'm guessing that perhaps you're indicating that you're part of the government procurement rules requiring to pay within 10 days for standard invoices and five days for eInvoices. And so
but currently the way your policy works is that you may not be able to meet those standards? I'm guessing that might be, if you want to elaborate, we'll see if we can answer that.
Liam has asked, how do we convince the more conspiracy-minded of our suppliers that eInvoicing isn't just being used by government to spy on transactions? Is there a resource that clearly explains who can see what, what's encrypted between each points, etc.?
Great question.
Well, I just…..for the benefit of everyone on this call, you can be reassured that the government does not see the invoice data that goes through the eInvoicing network. We do not have access to that data. It's just a pipeline for invoices,
eInvoices to reach the various end points, and we don't we don't get access or see that. And you’re also probably aware that the access point providers have to go through a rigorous accreditation process, which includes

Ohh.

security aspects of using that network. So you can be reassured about that. We don't have a specific resource that clearly explains that. We might just take that away and see what you can do. We'll see what we can do in that space.
Perhaps they're not your low-hanging fruit. If they're conspiracy-minded, then...
Maybe eInvoicing is not for them to start with.

Right, next question from Elisa Lamb. It's quite lengthy, so I'll try and paraphrase it, but essentially, Elisa's organisation has been unable to receive since November and have been reaching out to vendors, but have had reasonably limited uptake.
The question is, should they keep following the same formula? Well, one of the most successful things we've done in MBIE is what we call warm calling, which is identifying suppliers who we believe are candidates for eInvoicing and picking up the phone. And some of our team members did this and had a fantastic time. And I think we hit
10% of our inbound invoices within about three months of activity of doing that, mostly from MYOB and Xero suppliers.

Mm.
Yeah, yeah. We found that it's quite hard for people to say no when you're talking to them over the phone. So, you know, and sometimes it's just about reassuring them about how, you know, how to do it. And it's just that fear of change thing sometimes.
So we, you could point them to our eInvoicing webinar that we've had for small, medium enterprises specifically aimed at Xero and MYOB users. So for those that didn't attend that one, that was a couple of weeks ago, it's likely we'll run some more of those in the future and we will
publish the link to that recording in the next couple of weeks. That could be something that you do. You could decide to have an event for your Xero and MYOB users and bring all the accounts people together. We've done an in-person event in the past.
And that again, it's just giving them reassurance of how easy it is to do. So you just might have to try a couple of different techniques. Yeah, so try some of those and see how you get on.

Quick one from Michelle from NZ Trade and Enterprise. Hi, Michelle. How often is the spreadsheet of Active Senders to Government updated? Once a quarter, however, every now and then our eInvoicing champions across government will drip feed us additional suppliers, those that are doing active supplier onboarding, and
as it as it builds, we sometimes do updates in between as well.

Nikita has asked, we are suppliers and we use Microsoft 365 Dynamic. Should we wait for our government agencies to confirm they're using PEPPOL and happy to accept eInvoices or should we invest in getting one of those softwares like Xero or MYOB who should take the first step?
I think.
Again, not sure if people are aware of this as well, we do publish on the website all the government agencies that are registered to receive eInvoices, and it lists the name of that government agency and includes their NZBN and whether they can send and receive or both.
So you can check that list to see if they're ready and either get in touch with them and say you want to send eInvoices or you could just fire one through and see what happens. So yeah, I don't necessarily think you need to wait, but
perhaps if you have, if they have complex requirements or you have complex situation, it might be good to get in touch with them on that directly.
Can we please have the link to the supplier onboarding? Not sure if I missed it in the chat. These 2 onboarding ones that we've developed, one that I'm pretty sure Alison did put in the chat, which is a supplier communication toolkit. And then we've got a separate one which we're going to email out with this presentation.
And that's aimed more for government agencies for them to use because it references five-day payment and things like that. But you could, as a private organisation, could also use that. But there'll be an attachment that will go out in the email in the next couple of days.

I think we're just about there, Linda, just a little bit of feedback from Peter from Landcorp, saying that he's happy to pilot with a council.

Yes, so I know there are probably quite a few councils on this call, so if you're looking for some test partners, we have some here.

Yeah, I expect Landcorp receives invoices from a variety of councils across the country will be my expectation. But anyway, that looks like that's the end of the questions. Right on 11.45 pretty much, Linda.

Yeah, well, thank you so much for attending the session today. I hope it's been really useful and given you some ideas on to get cracking on onboarding suppliers, looking to hear how you go. So please give us feedback. Love to hear what's working, what's not. We'd love to do some more case studies in this space.

Yep.

So, please do let us know if you have
if you have any success stories to share.

Yeah, nice one.
Alright, thank you.