February 3, 2010 marks the first time a private company was able to send an electronic invoice for a product/service supplied to the European Commission.

This was made possible thanks to the IT tool 'e-Invoicing' and the 'e-PRIOR eProcurement platform', developed by the Commission's Directorate General for Informatics (DIGIT).

As public authorities, the Commission and other EU administrations purchase goods and services. For this, the institutions follow procurement procedures, which lead to the conclusion of public contracts.

Public contracts represent a part of the Community's expenditure and cover several areas such as obtaining and fitting out offices for Commission departments, purchasing IT equipment, commissioning consultancy work or technical assistance.

Until now, most of the exchanges between the Commission and its suppliers have been made on paper. Invoices, as a case in point, are all sent by post mail.

The eProcurement project began in 2007 in collaboration with several EU Member States and Standardisation Bodies.

Now, the supplier is able to send a secured invoice and other attached documents in XML format via the Internet. The invoice is received by the e-PRIOR platform, which can then deliver the invoice to 'SYSLOG Invoice', DIGIT's local invoice management system.

Financial agents are able to see the invoice as any other paper invoice that would have been scanned, and can ensure the payment far more quickly.

Since it is no longer necessary to scan the invoices and to create the invoice records manually in SYSLOG Invoice, it also lessens the number of human interactions, and therefore reduces payment delays.

In the future, the eProcurement team will organise a roll-out in order first to broaden the production to more suppliers, and then to expand it to further clients within the Commission services.

When other units in the Commission will use e-Invoicing, they can either use SYSLOG Invoice as a tool to manage invoices once received, or an interface will be developed between e-Invoicing and their own existing tool. The e-Invoicing module will also be interconnected with the other modules of the e-Procurement suite.

Furthermore, the e-Procurement model will be made available to be used by other administrations, and could also be applied to other areas where there is a need for sharing electronically secured and structured documents with third parties.