Last week the Australian Taxation Office (ATO) and NZ Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment (MBIE) hosted a forum in Sydney for software developers currently exploring Trans-Tasman eInvoicing through Peppol. This well attended event included representatives from both New Zealand and Australian government and local and international software developers active in the Peppol or eInvoicing spaces.
Following opening remarks from the ATO CIO Ramez Katf and Chief Digital Office, John Dardo, ABSIA's Head of Government Partnerships, Karen Lay-Brew set the scene, discussed ABSIA's recent role in helping to persuade the government to re-examine Peppol in 2018 and outlined some of the opportunities for the software industry working in this space. Karen's full remarks can be read here.
Subsequent presentations from the ATO and MBIE closely echoed the sentiments expressed by Rick Harvey from Layer Security who attended the recent OpenPeppol General Assembly on behalf of ABSIA. By choosing to develop on the Peppol standard, the Trans-Tasman efforts have gained an international community and swift progress is being made to bring wide scale invoicing to the region.
ABSIA Members - IBM, Squirrel Street, Qvalent and OZEDI - were well represented on the software industry panel and were central to the conversations around semantics, accreditation, security and adoption that arose as part of the subsequent workshop. ABSIA eInvoicing SIG lead, Simon Foster of Squirrel Street, also announced that Australian and New Zealand invoices are already being exchanged via the Production Peppol network - and that his company had launched a proof of concept in less than 7 days.
The key takeaways: Trans-Tasman eInvoicing is real; there is a community of software developers, service providers and access points driving adoption; and ABSIA Members are well positioned to get involved and bring their customers on this eInvoicing journey.
If you are not an ABSIA Member, there has never been a better time to join.