(09/09/08) Mondial Assistance France implements e-invoicing

Result: a cost divided by 3 and an accelerated process in the treatment of their invoices

9th September 2008: Mondial Assistance France sets up with their main suppliers a system of paperless invoicing fully compliant with strictest fiscal standards. This tax-compliant electronic invoicing accelerates the cycle of invoicing by suppliers, as well as the accounting treatment of invoices by Mondial Assistance. Savings realized make the investment profitable in only a few weeks.

"Our project of paperless invoicing is a new stage of modernization in the relationships with our suppliers" declares Patrick Joly, Director of Purchasing in Mondial Assistance France. "All the chain can now be computerized: the supplier receives his missions automatically thanks to our tool MIRA, he can send us an electronic invoice and he will receive the payment by credit transfer without any intervention. Savings in money and time allow us to dedicate ourselves even more to our customers by collaborating with suppliers released from heavy and expensive administrative constraints."

Total electronic invoicing
Since 2002, Mondial Assistance France has been developing a process of scanning and electronic treatment of the invoices of the suppliers: it allows an automatic matching between order forms and corresponding invoices. This first approach of e-invoicing allowed to accelerate the treatment of invoices, but requires an archiving of the original invoices, as their scanned images have no value of legal or fiscal proof. Indeed, the concept of tax-compliant paperless invoicing is still young, and was introduced only mid-2003 into the French law.

In 2008, Mondial Assistance France plans to handle 950,000 invoices received from 7,000 suppliers. With such a volume, the Purchasing Direction of Mondial Assistance France launched in 2006 a project aiming at e-invoicing their main suppliers. At first, the project focuses on the most important 200 suppliers who represent about 50% of the volume of invoices to be treated. Today 40% of the missions entrusted by Mondial Assistance France to their suppliers of the automotive sector are automatically transmitted thanks to their tool MIRA (Computerized Missionnement of the Assistance Network).

An ambitious project
The project of Mondial Assistance has several objectives. On the operational plan, it has the ambition to:
• Eliminate manual manipulations of paper documents.
• Reduce the number of errors linked to OCR treatment (Optical Character Recognition). One document out of 10 indeed poses reading problems.
• Reduce the delays of invoices treatment.
• Reduce the volume of not compliant invoices (15% of invoices do not have a compliant content).
• Support the suppliers in the implementation of successful computing tools.
 
This project also aims at reducing costs linked to the manipulation and archiving of invoices.
Finally, this new process needs to be perfectly compliant with the directives of the French Tax Administration, which gives a fiscal and legal value to electronic invoices.

A project made profitable in 2 weeks
By dividing by 3 the cost of treatment of one invoice, the e-invoicing project has been made profitable with only some thousands of invoices, equivalent to 2-3 weeks of average activity.

A simple implementation for Mondial Assistance France as well as for their suppliers 
Tax-compliant electronic invoicing is characterized by the lack of paper documents. The invoice can be transmitted in two ways:
• Either in the form of a not-structured file, transmitted electronically and secured through an electronic signature,
• Or in the form of a structured file, which must be transmitted according to a precise protocol; the integrity of the message and the identity of the issuer and receiver must be certified by a third-party provider.

Mondial Assistance France chose to work in partnership with Accelya, on the e-invoicing platform Clear' Invoice, already operational with some of their most important suppliers both in France and abroad. Suppliers of Mondial Assistance France can nevertheless freely choose their e-invoicing platform. Those platforms are indeed mostly connected between them and offer a perfect interoperability.
Accelya also collaborates with editors and other actors to help them integrate e-invoicing modules fully compliant with laws and directives in force. This collaboration helps the suppliers of Mondial Assistance France implement, at a lower cost, the necessary computing tools.


About Mondial Assistance France

24 hours a day and 365 days a year, Mondial Assistance France intervenes all around the world to bring to its customers -companies and private individuals- customized solutions of assistance and insurance in the sectors of automobile, travel, leisure activities, mobility, housing, employment, health and human services.

Mondial Assistance France belongs to the group Mondial Assistance, an international leader in travel insurance and assistance. It has a network of 400,000 suppliers and 180 correspondents. 250 million people benefit from their services, i.e. 4% of the world population. The group Mondial Assistance is member of Allianz Group.

www.mondial-assistance.fr


About Accelya

With over 700 employees worldwide, Accelya has been a major service provider in outsourced solutions of electronic invoicing and Professional Electronic Exchanges, such as Electronic Data Interchange (EDI…) for more than 30 years. 

Specialized in processing critical business transactions, Accelya notably processes more than 170 million airline tickets a year for the account of IATA (International Air Transport Association). Accelya thus guarantees every month the invoicing and payment launching of more than 40,000 travel agencies to many hundreds of airlines worldwide. 

Thanks to those years of expertise in the processing of critical data, in considerable volumes, under strong time constraints, Accelya has built secure and flexible offers, totally complying with business and company specifications: electronic invoicing, travel reservations, airline tickets, payment instructions, credit card transactions…

Each day, 70,000 business entities in more than 200 countries use Accelya solutions.

For more information on our e-invoicing services, please contact:
clear-invoice@accelya.com.