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August 28th, 2020
With big ideas floating around on a daily basis and a team of experienced software developers at our fingertips, we sometimes get so caught up in making our FLOW Partner Automation platform a success that we (very briefly) lose sight of our end-users. In attempt to give the platform unlimited capabilities, with a feature for every possible use case and a solution for every possible occurrence, we may have, well, over-complicated things a bit.
Customer Spotlight: Marcel van Oostveen, Eastmore
Lucky for us, Marcel van Oostveen of Eastmore, a privately-owned Dutch tax and business administration company for small entrepreneurs, told us exactly what we needed to hear to improve our FLOW platform.
Long story short, Marcel uses our business-to-government (B2G) electronic invoicing portal within FLOW to submit invoices to the Dutch government. He voiced his concern that the platform is much too complicated for the people who are using it on a regular basis (i.e. small suppliers), because there are “too many details, too many unknown words, too many links and buttons, and some mislabeled buttons.” Not what we wanted to hear!
The Result? Simplified B2G E-Invoicing for Suppliers
One thing led to another, and we now have an entirely new user interface for B2G e-invoicing, all thanks to Marcel (and our development team, of course). Speaking of his role in the creative process, he says, “I didn’t expect to work with the TIE Kinetix development team to create a new user interface for business-to-government e-invoicing. It was a pleasant surprise. I have spent a big part of my professional life struggling with tax declaration software, accounting software, and other software—nobody ever listened to me!”
For us, not listening to Marcel’s valid concerns simply wasn’t an option—the new user interface for B2G e-invoicing is better than ever. Now, when we say it’s not complicated, those words aren’t coming from our highly technical IT team. When speaking of the finished product, Marcel says, “The less clicks the better the software. The new interface makes it easier for myself and other suppliers to submit invoices because we reduced the number of clicks by at least 70%. And if an accounting program is able to generate the invoice as a spreadsheet in XLS, ODS, or whatever, then we reduced the number of clicks by 90%!”
Suppliers can now easily navigate our e-invoicing portal and, after submitting an invoice, can be confident that they’re meeting all B2G electronic invoicing regulations. You can read the all the details of the new interface in our FLOW Partner Automation Summer Release 2020.
