Italian government completes initial e-billing rollout phase

Among them are the Ministries, the Tax Agency and the state security forces. This regulation came into force accompanied by an additional three-month transition deadline, so that until last September 6, 2014, these organisations were still accepting some invoices on paper. Nevertheless, from now on the administrations will only pay their suppliers if they use the electronic billing format.

By the end of August 2014, more than 31,000 public offices had already signed up to the new system. There have also been 12,170 applications related with Local Authorities, even though these administrations are not required to migrate to electronic billing until March 31, 2015. That is the deadline for Italy to finalise the rollout of this technology in the public sector, initially scheduled for June 2015.

The initial balance of e-invoicing rollout in Italy is positive, due to the rapid spread among administrations and their suppliers and service providers. We can review the most important figures in the first three months of life of this system through a study by the Polytechnic University of Milan.

The analysis shows that the number of documents received is lower than expected for this first phase (between 7.5 and 10 million invoices). In July, 52,000 electronic invoices that did not meet the relevant requirements were rejected, 26.5% of the total received. Even so, the figures improved compared to June, when 40% of the documents were rejected. So, we can deduce that some suppliers may have encountered problems in generating the XML document.

Moreover, in this new stage the Public Administration will save up to EUR 17 for each invoice received, according to the Polytechnic University of Milan Observatory. From this total, EUR 14 corresponds to automation of the process and the other 3 to the reduction in material costs. In total, the annual benefit to the public sector could reach EUR 1000 million.