Paperless office: SMEs are lagging behind with e-billing

According to a survey by the digital association Bitkom, around 40 percent of German companies work completely or at least largely paperless. At the same time, 15 percent have switched to completely paperless operations, which is almost twice as many as two years ago. At 24 percent, around a quarter of processes still use letters, folders and the like.

However, the majority of office and administrative work in German companies is still paper-based. Over a third (38%) use paper for around half of their processes. For 14%, it is three quarters of processes and for 6% – an increase of two percentage points compared to 2022 – almost everything is paper-based. According to Bitkom, the survey is representative; over 1,100 companies with 20 or more employees in Germany were surveyed.

Fewer faxes, letters and filing cabinets

Overall, however, the industry association sees a trend away from paper. Around half of the companies have reduced the number of filing cabinets over the past five years. Overall, 96 percent are also open to digitizing their business processes. However, there are also obstacles: In addition to too high an investment requirement (76 percent), 75 percent said that too few qualified staff were the biggest hurdle to digitization.

88 percent stated that they wanted to replace letter post with digital communication. Currently, around 40 percent send letters frequently or very frequently (2022: 48 percent). Faxes are also still holding their own, with 30 percent still sending faxes frequently or very frequently. Two years ago, this figure was 40 percent. 10 percent have largely said goodbye to faxing.

Office suites, software for customer relationship management (CRM) and enterprise resource planning (ERP) are now standard and are used in 90 percent or more of companies. The situation is different with AI: Just over a third (35 percent) now use chatbots to automatically respond to inquiries, for example.

Smaller companies struggle with e-invoicing

The introduction of e-invoicing is also causing problems for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in particular, as pointed out by the provider Konica Minolta, which supported the Bitkom survey. So far, only slightly more than half of the companies surveyed (55 percent) have created e-invoices. And only 45 percent had the option of receiving them. If you only look at the larger companies with more than 500 employees, things look better: Here, two thirds of the companies surveyed already issued e-invoices. Many companies in the automotive industry, mechanical engineering companies and the transport and logistics sector in particular have not yet fully embraced e-invoicing.

Companies subject to VAT in Germany must be able to receive e-invoices for domestic sales from the beginning of 2025. The content is presented in a structured, machine-readable XML data set, i.e. not on paper scans or a PDF file. At the end of the 2026 calendar year, there will also be a staggered obligation to only send such structured invoice formats in business-to-business (B2B) transactions. Smaller companies with an annual turnover of less than 800,000 euros will be granted a one-year deferral. An e-mail inbox is all that is needed to receive an e-invoice, although appropriate software is of course also required to handle the structured XML. Audit-proof archiving in accordance with legal requirements (GOBD) is also mandatory for e-invoice recipients.

A survey conducted by software provider Sage in July revealed even worse figures on the status of e-invoicing in German SMEs: according to the survey, only four percent of the small and medium-sized companies surveyed had already introduced e-invoicing, while 36 percent said they were at least familiar with electronic invoicing. According to Sage, this puts Germany at the bottom of a comparison of seven European countries.

(axk)