On the home straight with e-invoicing

“For Webasto, tangro is the right partner to implement a strategy of centralised, legally compliant digitalisation of invoice processing around the world,” says Jürgen Nickles, Business Analyst at Webasto, one of the top 100 suppliers for car manufacturers. E-invoicing and centralisation are key to the company’s accounting – and software from tangro.

Particularly good progress has been made at the sites in Mexico and Italy, where Webasto has been processing invoices electronically using structured XML data alone. E-invoicing is essential for fighting tax fraud and corruption in Mexico and Italy. So Webasto was urgently looking for a solution and was delighted with how professionally it was implemented: “tangro has vast experience in EDI and supports important formats. So we quickly had a fully functional e-invoicing solution for both countries,” says Jürgen Nickles.

In Mexico, suppliers submit their electronic invoices to an Outlook mail box, that was set up specifically to receive XML files. In Italy companies have to exchange all invoices via the state SDI (Sistema Di Interscambio) portal. tangro therefore collects the incoming invoice data from the SDI portal via a service provider and prepares it so that it can be posted without further intermediate stages or, if necessary, so it can be postprocessed and sent to the workflow.

 “Because of the various tax regulations, documents cannot always be mapped in full and therefore posted automatically. Postprocessing is often still needed at the end of the day", explains Jürgen Nickles. However, XML data records are so cryptic that laypeople are not able to read and check them with ease. Nickles therefore describes the option of depicting XML files in tangro as PDFs as extremely useful. In this form, the clerk can simply postprocess any EDI invoice and if necessary correct the tax codes. “We successfully implemented electronic invoice processing with tangro in Italy and Mexico and are now ready to roll it out across Europe,” concludes Nickles.

At the other Webasto sites, various approaches are still being taken to invoice processing depending on how the documents are received: paper-based invoices are scanned in, PDF invoices are taken straight from the e-mail and files sent via OCR are converted into text. tangro recognises and interprets the relevant content and passes the data onto SAP. If all the values are present and correct, these invoices can then be processed and posted in a fully automatic manner. If information is missing or if there are discrepancies, the administrators postprocess the documents. A strategy of centralisation further improves efficiency. 

Webasto has been using tangro IM software for automated processing of incoming invoices since 2012. The software provides a particularly clearly arranged invoice entry journal with extensive selection options. The clearly arranged SAP interface, which is easy for users to work with, is just as important: “You instantly know where you are with tangro because the interface is the same as that of the SAP system", says Jürgen Nickles. Rapid processing of incoming invoices is also ensured by the professional electronic processing of release and approval workflows with corresponding approval levels.

At the same time, the software provides great flexibility thanks to easy-to-control customisation and scope for activating Webasto’s own MIRO. According to Jürgen Nickles, it was also important to Webasto that the solution included extensive support for various languages and countries: “The fact that we can use tangro around the world and flexibly scale it up or down makes it a solution fit for the future at Webasto.”