GetYourBill, simple and error-free invoicing

It has been “only” three years since the introduction of the mandatory electronic invoicing requirement in 2019. A short time, but in the context of technological progress it is enough to radically change a habit, a process. All the pre-e-invoicing activities (manually filling in all the necessary information, the paperwork to bring to the accountant, collecting customer signatures…) now seem like a distant memory.

And yet, for some businesses, part of that “inconvenience” still exists today: we’re talking about **flat-rate VAT number holders** and all **SMEs**, who are sometimes required to issue an invoice, perhaps right at the moment of payment at the till. Gathering all the information needed to issue an invoice can take several minutes, creating queues and waiting times.

The founders of GetYourBill had already realised back in 2014 — well ahead of the regulatory framework that would later follow — that digitalisation was the way to solve this problem. In fact, since 2014, GetYourBill has offered a platform for issuing electronic invoices from the point of sale and from e-commerce. Thanks to integration with the most widely used point-of-sale management systems and to a cloud database lookup, points of sale only need the customer’s VAT number to instantly obtain all the other data and generate an error-free electronic invoice, also thanks to the collaboration with Intesa.

«Since 2018 we have relied on Intesa, a certification authority with extensive expertise and know-how for checking, signing, transmitting and legally compliant preservation of the invoice’s XML file» said Alvise Abù-Khalil, president and co-founder of Ultroneo, in a recent interview with MarkUp.

Intesa, in fact, supports GetYourBill in checking invoices, transmitting them to the Sistema di Interscambio (SdI, Italy’s electronic invoice exchange system managed by the Revenue Agency) and providing legally compliant preservation for 10 years, a set of functions to which “automatic correction” of invoices has now been added.

«We have introduced a checking and correction system into the GetYourBill platform, so that a rejected invoice is recovered and handled. This is thanks to Intesa’s contribution, which acts as a filter and blocks complex situations upstream. Our rejection rate is now close to zero», the co-founder continues. The collaboration between GetYourBill and Intesa has enabled many SMEs and small merchants to simplify and shorten the time needed to issue electronic invoices, thanks to API integration and cloud technologies, while also benefiting from the security guarantee provided by a certification authority.

Confirming a successful partnership, in addition to support for formal checks and invoice transmission, GetYourBill also chose Intesa to manage contractual paperwork with merchants, through the new Intesa Sign signature platform. Operationally, Intesa Sign has been integrated with GetYourBill’s customer management system, from which it retrieves merchant data to fill in subscription documents. Intesa’s systems then generate a link to be made available for signing contracts with an Advanced Electronic Signature in “click to sign” mode, which are also kept in legally compliant preservation.

GetYourBill is now looking to the future, anticipating customers’ needs. «We are working on the internationalisation of invoicing, because the European market is increasingly becoming a domestic market. We are often contacted by foreign companies that have customers in Italy and need to manage invoicing in our country». This is an area that will require close attention, especially given the EU’s involvement: the results achieved with electronic invoicing in Italy have indeed been noticed by the European Commission, which is working to create a shared regulatory framework for invoicing.

Amid these ongoing regulatory developments, the journey of electronic invoicing in Italy is therefore still evolving.

MarkUp, Electronic invoicing: how to optimise efficiency in retail