The productive start with a rollout of the entire administration of the e-invoice workflow VIM (Vendor Invoice Management) for the City of Bonn was successfully launched on February 1, 2021.

As sub-central contracting authorities, local authorities in Germany are obliged to be able to receive and process electronic invoices (e-invoices) in accordance with Section 11 (2) of the E-Invoicing Ordinance. This is based on EU Directive 2014/55/EU of the European Parliament and of the Council on electronic invoicing for public contracts and the associated laws and regulations.

In order to meet this obligation for the City of Bonn, it is necessary to switch to an end-to-end electronic processing process for vendor invoices that does not affect revenue accounting (SAP-PSCD) or the preliminary procedures of the specialist departments. The processing of all incoming invoices on the output side (regardless of their form of receipt) will then no longer be carried out using paper documents/requests. In the SAP accounting software, invoices will in future be sent via workflow to the responsible employees / decentralized administrators in all departments for checking, approval, credit account assignment and instruction, where they will be processed digitally.

In future, all processing, including the factual/accounting (approval note) and the recognized/authorizing signature (authority to issue instructions), will be carried out exclusively electronically. This means that signatures can be made at the click of a mouse, e.g. from the home office, thus enabling fully digital processing. Invoices/credit notes, which are still received in paper form or as PDF files by e-mail, will also be integrated into the electronic invoice processing procedure. For this purpose, a central invoice receipt and scanning point has been set up in the cash and tax office. The audit-proof filing of the digitized documents is carried out by the Doxis application from SER through replacement scanning.