Finnish startup Zervant on a mission to automate small business invoicing in Europe – Switching from paper to electronic invoicing provides an average saving of €25 per invoice
HELSINKI, March 1st, 2016 – Zervant, a fintech startup that provides 80 000 business users with cloud-based invoicing software, announces plans to bring invoicing automation across Europe with an advanced e-invoicing solution.
E-invoicing, or electronic invoicing, is a complete end-to-end method of creating, sending, receiving and processing business-to-business (B2B) invoices in electronic format. As opposed to merely sending PDF invoices by email, it’s a fully automated process that is integrated into accounting tools and banking systems.
Finland has the highest number of invoices sent in fully electronic format in the world, according to the accounting body ACCA. 89% of large and 59% of small businesses have already adopted e-invoicing, compared with the global average of 8.4%.
Zervant’s CEO Mattias Hansson comments: ”Small businesses are often late adopters, which is also true when it comes to electronic invoicing. But we have still seen huge growth in this segment in the Finnish market. In fact our figures show that in the last three years the number of small businesses using electronic invoicing has more than doubled each year.”
The European Commission estimates that Europe-wide adoption of e-invoicing will bring savings of €64.5BN and 1 million metric tons of CO2 emissions per annum, due to reduced amount of postal invoices.
Zervant has raised 4 million Euros of funding to date, from the Finnish venture capital fund Conor Venture Partners, the Finnish government (Tekes), as well as angel investors. The company’s core markets are the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Sweden and Finland and it plans to make e-invoicing available to all European small businesses.
About Zervant:
Zervant provides simple, intuitive invoicing software for small businesses, freelancers and entrepreneurs. To date, Zervant’s software has over 80,000 business users in 160 countries. Headquartered in Helsinki, Finland, Zervant was founded in 2010 and has raised over 4 million of venture capital and angel funding. www.zervant.com
