SINGAPORE – Companies can now obtain digital invoices from the Authorities by means of nationwide community InvoiceNow – a transfer that may assist them minimize processing time and price.
The Housing Board, JTC Company and Maritime and Port Authority of Singapore (MPA) are the primary public companies to faucet the platform to invoice corporations, corresponding to for functions of permits and licences.
About 70 per cent of the invoices issued by the general public sector come from these three organisations. Each month, their 25,000 enterprise clients obtain greater than 49,000 invoices.
Extra public companies are anticipated to make use of the community later. Since January final yr, authorities companies have been capable of obtain e-invoices themselves from companies by means of InvoiceNow, which was launched in 2019 by the Infocomm Media Growth Authority (IMDA).
Asserting the transfer for HDB, JTC and MPA on Tuesday (Nov 30), IMDA stated that is a part of the Authorities’s efforts to drive transformation and assist companies seize alternatives within the digital financial system.
InvoiceNow permits companies to difficulty e-invoices to different organisations on the community in Singapore and transact extra cheaply. It’s also a part of a world e-invoicing community that covers greater than 400,000 corporations.
A 2018 examine commissioned by IMDA discovered that e-invoicing minimize the quantity of effort and time wanted to re-key knowledge into firm techniques, with financial savings of as much as $8 per bill processed.
The authority famous that quicker processing occasions when companies ship their very own e-invoices, lowering their carbon footprint, too, since paper invoices are now not used.
These e-invoices use a standardised digital format and cast off current digitised invoices, corresponding to scanned invoices, which require some human enter to course of.
The replace on InvoiceNow comes because the Covid-19 pandemic prompts extra folks and firms to go digital. The Authorities stated in February that the quantity of cash transacted by means of the PayNow on the spot fund switch service hit $5 billion in December final yr, double the quantity from a yr in the past.
PayNow Company for companies can be utilized to make funds for e-invoices on InvoiceNow.
Since its launch, InvoiceNow has added extra corporations. In March 2020, there have been simply 1,000. In September final yr, this jumped to about 25,000 and now, there are greater than 40,000.
Nonetheless, solely about 10 per cent of the 25,000 enterprise clients of HDB, JTC and MPA are on InvoiceNow presently.
Ms Cindy Sim, MPA’s director for finance, procurement and administration, stated its issuance of e-invoices is in step with the digital transformation of the maritime trade.
“This serves as an extra platform for our clients to obtain invoices digitally… with higher effectivity. We hope this may assist extra maritime corporations speed up adoption of digital enterprise processes,” she added.