Carlsberg Denmark

Converting to e-invoicing the Carlsberg way

Industry:

Food & Beverage

Regions:

Europe

Solutions:

E-Invoice Sending

When Carlsberg found out that postage costs were about to double their costs, they knew it was time for a change. Learn how they increased their e-invoice rate to 96% with Basware's solutions.

Carlsberg Denmark sends around 45,000 invoices each month. Their customers were asking for email invoices and then, with the news that postage costs were suddenly about to double, Carlsberg quickly ramped up their e-invoice rate. It’s now a whopping 96%.

Credit Manager, Liselotte Frost Christensen, explains the beginning of her journey with Basware, “In 2014, we had requests from quite a few customers who would like to receive their invoices by email and we went with Basware.” This gave Carlsberg an integrated solution and allowed them to outsource their printing as PostDenmark was going to double the fee for posting printing invoices.

Key takeaways

96%

e-invoice rate

48%

Postal cost savings

79%

Emailed invoices

Carlsberg's challanges

"It was a simple solution: we wanted to send an email to a customer as a PDF attachment – we have a lot of small customers, single-owner companies (small shops) and we didn’t want to make it too complicated for them. Basware was able to offer that.”

The email delivery service is part of the complete invoicing process involving end-to-end data files. It allows them to increase the share of electronically delivered invoices among those recipients who are not able to receive e-invoices in more advanced formats using the integrated, automated output of structured data.

Currently we are sending email invoices to 96% of our customers. It is fantastic! Liselotte Frost Christensen, Credit Manager, Carlsberg Group

How Carlsberg increased their e-invoicing rate to 96% with Basware

Together with a member of her team and with the involvement of sales, Frost Christensen built a business case and got it signed off with the CFO and the management team. “I had to show a case where we could save money. If we managed to transform 75% of our customers to email we would have an extraordinarily good business case.”

“In April 2015, we implemented our new finance systems and that’s when we really went live with the Basware solution in full,” says Frost Christensen. “Our email share was 48% – quite high from the beginning. In February 2016, we informed our customers that they would receive email invoices from our side and that they could ‘activate themselves’ to receive these. Quite quickly we went up to 79% of email share.”

Through having visibility of what’s going through our system we don’t have all these uncertainties anymore. Previously we wouldn’t have known if they did receive a reminder. Now it’s in on the portal. It’s very easy to keep track of what has happened.

Liselotte Frost Christensen, Credit Manager, Carlsberg Group

Results

“I can see that sending invoices in the past was always difficult for me, when I had to look into our cost and see why we were spending so much money, or how many dunning (reminder) letters we were sending each month. We didn’t really know."

The statistics from the Basware dashboard allow me to follow up very closely. We have been able to save 48% on our postal cost. That has proven the business case.Liselotte Frost Christensen, Credit Manager, Carlsberg Group

It has also been beneficial in other ways, when we’re looking to optimize our processes. For example, we added a line of text at the top of our printed invoices encouraging customers to sign up for an email invoice, instead of a printed one in the future. We couldn’t have done this in the past.”