For several months now I have been working on the e-invoicing reform for a hotel group. The sector is a particularly rich field of observation: business-to-business invoicing, invoicing to private individuals, and everything in between — travel agencies, business travellers who book as individuals and then get reimbursed, the multiplicity of distribution channels, food and beverage. Few sectors combine so many different scenarios.
The race for vendor compliance hides what matters most
For the past eighteen months, attention has focused on one question: will my software vendor be ready? It is a legitimate question, but it takes up almost all the available space, and it overshadows two issues that will actually decide between success and failure.
First issue: customer data quality
An electronic invoice is routed by identifiers. A missing postcode, an incorrect intra-EU VAT number, incorrect routing information, and the invoice is rejected on technical grounds — before it even reaches the customer. This is not a commercial refusal that can be negotiated over the phone: it is an automatic rejection on submission.
Yet most customer master data contains records entered years ago and never checked since. Companies change their name, move, merge, close down. Master data that has not been checked against the public registers for a long time inevitably contains errors, and until now those errors were absorbed by humans. They no longer will be.
Second issue: process organisation
When the platforms go live, anomalies will appear — that is certain, whatever the level of preparation. The real question is whether the organisation will be able to detect them quickly, understand where they come from, and resolve them before cash flow suffers.
This means that someone must be responsible for tracking rejections, that the correction workflow must be defined in advance, and that the accounting, sales and IT teams must know who does what. These matters are dealt with before the cutover, not during it.
What will really decide the outcome
Technical compliance is necessary but not sufficient. Success will rest on data quality, on the adaptation of business processes, and on coordination between the IT, finance and sales teams and external partners.
These are three organisational workstreams, not three technical ones. They require calendar time that no budget can compress — which is why it is better to have started them already.
A first version of this text was published on LinkedIn (in French). If customer master data is a concern for you, Base Sociétés addresses precisely this problem.