Electronic invoicing
Paper. Piles and piles of paper. Purchase orders. Despatch orders. Shipping manifests. Delivery slips. Receipts. Invoices. Payment statements. Paper to verify. Paper to type into the computer system. Paper to file away.
And every piece of it a waste of time, effort, money and CO2.
Luckily, guidelines now exist for electronic versions of all these sorts of business documents. Standardised guidelines enabling trading partners to smoothly exchange information electronically, no matter what their internal hardware or software systems.
With such standards, partners in a supply chain can work together to respond more rapidly to consumers’ demands. Without so much paper.
But for this to happen, hundreds of stakeholders around the world need to come together: retailers and producers, clients and suppliers, hardware and software manufacturers, authorities… people would never be able to agree on a common solution without the help an organisation like GS1. Present in 108 countries. Working not for profit, but for the benefit of the community.