This is an EHF invoice

🤔 What's the point?

EHF is the abbreviation for electronic trade format, also called e-trade format, and is a digital way of transferring invoice data, instead of on paper or a PDF document.

🏛️ State and municipal requirements

The format was first developed by the public sector and the background was simple: Imagine that you are a large government organization that receives hundreds of invoices, bills and vouchers every week on paper or by e-mail. Previously, these may have had to be scanned or entered manually into the accounting systems. This, of course, led to a very large amount of work, little overview and, not least, opportunities for mistakes to be entered.

State agencies and municipalities now have a requirement that everyone who is going to invoice must deliver the invoice in electronic EHF format. The result of this has been that private companies also increasingly want to send and receive EHF invoices.

🚀 Advantages:

• You save time sending and receiving invoices easily.
• The recipient does not have to scan or enter the invoice information by hand. All the information automatically enters the accounting program and can be processed there.
• The format ensures that all the information is filled in correctly before you send it off
• You are sure that the file will actually appear. In other words, you don't have to look for the recipient's e-mail or address.
• You save the environment by reducing the use of paper.

🤖 Electronic invoicing

A parallel to EHF in the private market is eFaktura, which has become the leading electronic invoice format for invoices sent from companies to consumers. In the same way, EHF has become the leading electronic format for invoices sent from companies to other companies.

Most invoice programs, including PayoutPartner, support sending EHF invoices to other companies.

💶 EHF - not just digital bills

Technically, the EHF formats consist of various types of documents and instructions on how these should be formatted. This is not something you need to think about on a daily basis, but it can be useful to be aware of. These document types are invoice, catalogue, order and packing slip info. In practice, it is the invoice format that is the most used, with almost 98% of the various formats.

Those listed in The ELMA register can receive an invoice in EHF format and has agreed to receive digital invoices. ELMA stands for electronic recipient register and is an overview of both invoice systems and recipients that accept EHF. The register itself contains information about what type of documents the recipient can receive.

💯 Large volumes

In November 2022 alone, over 19 million EHF documents were sent via the ELMA solution, of which 97.6% are invoices.

PayoutPartner satisfies the requirements for sending EHF invoices, through that
- we support the requirements for the formats for EHF.
- follows the invoice process as laid down by DigDir
- Supports the e-mail network Peppol and is associated with the ELMA register

✉️ How to create and send an EHF invoice?

With PayoutPartner, it is super easy to create an electronic invoice.

You do it in exactly the same way as a normal invoice.

But instead of choosing to send the invoice by e-mail when you are ready to send, you choose the button where it says to send it as EHF.

It doesn't get any easier!