Zervant solves invoicing woes for small businesses
Did you know sending out a paper invoice costs nearly six times more than electronic one? Zervant aims to make e-invoicing easier for small businesses.
E-invoicing or electronic invoicing means sending, receiving and processing invoices in an automated system. It is a cost-efficient and practical tool for maintaining accounts, but for smaller companies e-invoicing has not always been the first choice.
Finnish start-up Zervant has developed e-invoicing software that is easy to use and allows sending invoices to multiple channels. Zervant’s software has over 80,000 business users in 160 countries. It was founded in 2010 and has so far raised over 4 million of venture capital and angel funding.
Their cloud-based invoicing software has been designed small businesses, freelancers and entrepreneurs in mind. The interest towards e-invoicing is growing in this group.
“Small businesses are often late adopters, which is also true when it comes to electronic invoicing. But we have still seen huge growth in this segment in the Finnish market. In fact our figures show that in the last three years the number of small businesses using electronic invoicing has more than doubled each year”, says Zervant’s CEO Mattias Hansson.
Plans to automate invoicing in Europe
Finland has been the forerunner of e-invoicing, but globally it is still relatively new phenomenon. According to the accounting body ACCA, the global average for adopting e-invoicing is 8.4 %. In contrast, 89% of large and 59% of small companies is using e-invoicing in Finland.
Hansson is expecting more growth outside Finland, as other Europe starts to adopt e-invoicing country by country.
“Zervant is growing by 200 new businesses each day. At the moment 85% of our growth comes outside Finland”, he continues.
This creates new business opportunities and potential for growth, but also means significant savings for the public sector and environment. The European Commission estimates that Europe-wide adoption of e-invoicing will bring yearly savings of €64.5BN and 1 million metric tons of CO2 emissions.
