Cost, demand drive e-billing

By Warwick Ashford, ITWeb London correspondent

Johannesburg, 02 Aug 2005

The lower cost of sending statements, invoices and credit notes in electronic format is likely to be the most important factor for driving adoption of e-billing by local companies, according to new e-billing market entrant MWEB Business.

"Cost is likely to be the most compelling reason to switch to e-billing especially small and medium enterprises [SMEs], with e-bills costing as little as R1.60 each for this sector compared with an average of R2.85 for paper-based mail," says Anton Gaylard, application service provider (ASP) division GM at MWEB Business.

"E-billing is cost-effective for any business that sends out more than 200 accounts a month because of the savings in preparation and distribution time," says Gaylard.

Apart from the cost savings, Gaylard says businesses should be looking at e-billing because of increasing customer demand. He says e-billing also provides an efficient channel of communication with customers with little cost implications.

MWEB Business is optimistic about the e-billing adoption rate among businesses and customers, and is predicting a volume of around 30 000 e-bills within a few months, with the fastest initial adoption coming from MWEB`s SME Internet customers.

Although the ASP-based e-billing offering launched by MWEB Business last week is capable of scaling to meet corporate requirements, Gaylard says SMEs are likely to benefit the most. "While the corporate market is fairly competitive, there has been little available for SMEs until now."

Gaylard claims that by choosing an ASP model that integrates easily with most popular SME accounting packages, MWEB Business has made e-billing more accessible to SMEs because there are no added hardware or integration costs involved.

Another benefit of the ASP model is that companies will be able to switch some customers to e‑billing, while continuing to print paper accounts for others, he says. "It is merely a question of sending the accounts to different printer drivers."