E-invoice: Contribute to creating healthy ecosystem of investment – business

Mr. Mac Quoc Anh (photo), Vice president cum Secretary General of Hanoi Medium and Small Business Association

Customs News spoke with Mac Quoc Anh (photo), Vice president cum Secretary General of Hanoi Medium and Small Business Association on this issue.

With online trading, buying and selling growing, what are the roles and benefits of e-invoices?

The e-invoice contributes to cost reduction and modernisation of business activities. In order not to lag behind in the context of integration and globalisation as well as catching up with the trend, enterprises must explore and apply modern technologies in the process of operation. The popularity and development are increasingly strong as well as the outstanding benefits of e-invoice could be listed such as improving labour efficiency, management and financial management.

As all businesses are aiming to cut production and operations costs to improve competitiveness, the use of e-invoice is an effective solution. For example, when talking about the average cost of issuing an invoice, if applying an e-invoice, the cost of issuing invoices is much lower than before. According to experts, the calculation can be reduced by 80 percent.

In addition, the number of invoices issued weekly and monthly is quite large. Thus, besides cutting a large amount of time and expenses, using the e-invoice helps the comparision of invoices to implement quickly and avoid many errors.

The benefits of e-invoices are undeniable, but still some enterprises are afraid to them. Why is this?

There are many reasons for the difficult implementation of e-invoice. First of all, we must mention to the customs and habits. Vietnamese enterprises, especially small and medium-sized enterprises or business households, still use papers invoice for purchase and sale transactions. It has become too common for both sellers and buyers (in their thoughts). Therefore, it is difficult to change this transaction.

The second difficulty is the level of knowledge about technology. Micro and small enterprises all have low starting points, fragmented small business, low level of knowledge of IT, poor quality of human resources. Hence, when they do not have enough knowledge to operate new things, they will be afraid to use and do not want to change.

Another difficulty is initial investment costs. To deploy the use of electronic invoice documents, you need computers, networked equipment, line services and many other expenses. Hence, for micro businesses and business households it is not simple.

In order to achieve the goal that by July 2022, the e-invoice can completely replace paper invoices, do you have any recommendations?

In the future, the taxation sector should focus on its resources for deploying wide propagada to businesses about the benefits and advantages when applying e-invoices, and coordinate with suppliers to organise many conferences to guide specific and detailed to organisations and enterprises about the preparation of facilities, technical infrastructure and operations in order to set up and use e-invoice. Through the conferences, all problems and difficulties of taxpayers should be answered and removed immediately.

In addition, tax authorities of provinces and cities need to set up teams to deploy and publicise telephone numbers to directly support enterprises in the process of implementing e-invoice. Thereby, creating a synchronous connection between management agencies, solving issues related to costs and roadmap for applying e-invoice.