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This “e-invoicing week”, the government is cautioning Australian businesses to get their systems up to date or risk being left behind.
And when it comes to managing payments in the real estate sector, while the industry has made great gains with the many proptech solutions on offer, it’s clear that there’s still a way to go.
An initiative that’s being promoted by the Australian Taxation Office with the help of a number of government entities and representatives, including Julie Collins, Minister for Small Business and Minister for Housing and Homelessness, e-invoicing week urges all companies, regardless of size, to think of digital payment management as the new standard way of operating.
A wide range of virtual events, podcasts, media and social media content has been rolling out over the week in order to get businesses up to speed with what e-invoicing is, how it differs from PDF and email, and the potential risks of letting your systems stagnate under older models.
As ATO Deputy Commissioner Will Day noted, not only does e-invoicing look to speed up the process by which payments can be managed, but the new technologies created to handle these processes also greatly reduce the risk of fake or compromised invoices and email billing scams.
“With eInvoicing, the invoice is delivered directly into the customer’s software via a secure network, so there’s less risk of lost or fraudulent invoices being paid,” he said.
Ms Collins noted that the government was committed to ensuring Australian businesses stayed on the cutting edge, and supporting the uptake of e-invoicing was an important part of that puzzle.
“We will continue to deliver educational activities to raise business awareness, further supply chain pilots to gain insights and drive adoption, and work with state, territory and local governments,” she said.
In the real estate industry, Managed App’s Matthew Wilson noted that there are plenty of businesses that could use the encouragement to update their payment systems, particularly in property management.
“I believe the real estate industry is miles behind, not just on the [e-invoicing] front but the general tracking and processing of payments as a whole. We have a payment processing system in place (the trust account) which is around a century old. The trust account was initially introduced to protect the interest of owners and tenants but the number one offence real estate agents are prosecuted for is trust account fraud,” he noted.
And while some of these instances are unfortunate abuses of the system, others are simply due to the fact that the antiquated method of operating is susceptible to error, particularly for overtaxed professionals who have a multitude of payments to keep track of.
“There are up to 15 manual touch points per property per month in the legacy payment space for a property management division, daily recepting, the manual processing of invoices, owners disbursements, reconciliation to name a few,” Mr Wilson noted.
“Each of those touch points may only take a few seconds but add up overtime, further to this each of those touchpoints leaves room for mistakes.”
In his view, the rapid adoption of e-invoicing can’t come soon enough for the industry, particularly because real estate professionals are not only the issuers of invoices, but the receivers of them, too.
“When I was a property manager we actually lost management due to the lack of e-invoicing,” he noted, recalling an instance where council rates mailed to the office had been lost in the post, and the management company came under fire from the properties’ landlords for not picking up on the issue soon enough.
“Invoices being lost in the post is just one example. It is still common today for a trades person to drop off a handful of papers written invoices on a receptionist’s desk to process. This causes time delays, as they need to be scanned into the computer to process, it also increases the risk of errors,” he said.
“[E-invoicng] is honestly a no brainer and can dramatically increase efficiency and eliminate mistakes in any property management business,” Mr Wilson added.
E-invoicing week runs through 21 August.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Juliet Helmke
Based in Sydney, Juliet Helmke has a broad range of reporting and editorial experience across the areas of business, technology, entertainment and the arts. She was formerly Senior Editor at The New York Observer.
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