On the face of it, invoicing sounds like a relatively straightforward task. For a manufacturer with hundreds (or even thousands) of B2B customers, it’s actually dozens of tasks that take hours every week to complete. Customers expect the invoices they receive from manufacturers to follow their desired format, their fields and preferred delivery route, even though it comes from one standard system.
Let’s use the example of a mid-sized manufacturer with 200 customers with varying invoicing requirements. One of their large European customers will only accept a structured invoice sent across the PEPPOL network, while a German customer requires XRechnung. Meanwhile, the company’s ERP system is designed to generate a standard set of invoice outputs. It can be configured within limits, but anything beyond that tends to mean manual work and costly custom development requests.
The manufacturer sets none of these requirements. They come from expanding e-invoicing mandates and customer requirements, but the cost of meeting them lands on the manufacturer. Divided across finance and IT teams, it never shows as a single figure, making it a difficult problem to quantify and fix.
Key Takeaways
- Manufacturers are required to send invoices in various formats due to government e-invoicing mandates and customer requirements, and the list of formats to offer grows with every new market.
- The cost of supporting all these formats is spread across finance and IT due to manual rekeying and custom ERP development, so it rarely shows up as a single cost figure.
- An ERP is built to produce fixed, standard outputs, so customising it to handle every format requires costly development and constant maintenance.
- The solution is a transformation and validation layer that sits alongside the ERP, turning each new format into a change in configuration rather than a time-consuming, costly development project.
- How many invoice formats and customer-specific layouts do you actually produce?
- How many are handled by hand? Are any automated?
- How long does it take, and who needs to be involved, to add or change an invoice format?
- Over the last three months, how many invoices were disputed or rejected, and why?
Why invoice format requirements keep multiplying
The more customers and markets a manufacturer serves, the longer its list of invoice formats becomes. It’s the by-product of business growth, and it’s driven by a mix of customer preferences, government mandates and cross-border trade:
Customer requirements
Larger buyers increasingly see a specific invoice format, layout or set of fields as a condition of trading. If a manufacturer wants their business, they need to receive the invoice in their preferred format.
Government mandates
E-invoicing regulations are either live or in the works in over 60 countries, with more mandates coming into effect every month. 2026 and 2027 represent an e-invoicing tipping point across Europe, the Middle East, Asia and Latin America, and each new mandate brings its own e-invoicing requirements.
Cross-border trade
A national format only applies where a manufacturer does business, but selling across borders means several apply at the same time. A manufacturer invoicing customers in Germany, France and Italy has to meet three standards, each with its own rules.
The manufacturer doesn’t choose these formats. It inherits them, and the list grows with every new customer it signs and new market it enters.
The real cost of format sprawl for manufacturers
The cost of supporting many invoice formats is spread across finance and IT rather than concentrated in one place, which is why it is easy to underestimate. It shows up in a few key areas:
Manual rekeying and reformatting
When the ERP can’t produce what a customer needs, someone has to do the work manually, copying data into templates, adjusting layouts and reformatting files. Processing an invoice manually costs between $12 and $15 per invoice, compared to $2 to $4 when automated. That $10 difference adds up very quickly, and hundreds of invoices a month turn it into an eye-watering annual cost.
Custom ERP development
The alternative to manual work is building the format into the ERP, which means custom development and, from then on, ongoing maintenance. Every format added is another element to test, patch and protect through upgrades, and this is where total cost of ownership (TCO) starts to creep up.
Rejected and disputed invoices
If the invoice format is incorrect in some way, the customer’s system rejects it. Common causes are failed schema validation, missing fields (such as tax ID) and reference numbers that don’t match the buyer’s purchase order. Each rejection means more employee time correcting and resubmitting invoices, at an estimated rectification cost of $53.50 per invoice.
The cash flow and DSO hit
A rejected invoice is a late payment waiting to happen. Every extra day an invoice spends being reformatted, resent or disputed increases days sales outstanding (DSO). With the average DSO for manufacturing sitting between 45 and 60 days, further payment delays can quickly cause problems.
The scaling problem
The costs we’ve explored recur and grow over time. New customers bring another format to build into your system, so the workload increases with each new account your business wins.
The invoice formats manufacturers are asked to support
The formats a manufacturer supports are dictated by its customers. Two main questions determine the requirements of each invoice: whether it must be structured (machine-readable) or visual(a human-readable document), and exactly what it must contain and its layout.
A manufacturer trading across Europe usually has to support three types of format requirement:
PEPPOL BIS and UBL
PEPPOL is often referred to as a ‘format’, but it is two elements working together. The first is a network for securely sending electronic documents between organisations. The second is the document standard used on that network, the PEPPOL Business Interoperability Specifications (BIS).
It is built on Universal Business Language (UBL), an XML standard for business documents, and is aligned to EN 16931, the European standard that outlines what e-invoices must contain.
PEPPOL e-invoicing is the network and UBL-based profile used together to exchange structured invoices. PEPPOL is increasingly required for public sector and European business trade.
Country-specific structured formats
Individual countries also use their own structured formats. For example, Germany uses XRechnung, a structured XML format. France and Germany jointly developed Factur-X (called ZUGFeRD in Germany), which is a format that places structured CII (Cross Industry Invoice) inside a normal PDF, so it can be read by humans and machines. Italy uses FatturaPA, which must be transmitted through the government’s Sistema di Interscambio (SdI) exchange platform.
Each market has its own rules, mandatory fields and delivery routes, so selling into three countries tends to mean supporting at least three different invoice formats.
Customer-specific layouts and fields
Not every new rule comes from following government e-invoicing requirements. Some layout and field requirements come from the customer directly. Customers sometimes want invoice customisation to ensure data is presented in a specific way – they want to see their own branding, a particular language or currency or data presented in specific fields so their system can match the invoice automatically.
The costs come when standard ERP outputs have to be changed, typically through extensive customisation.
Why the ERP alone cannot keep up
The reason manufacturers’ chosen ERP systems can’t keep up comes down to architecture. Their ERPs are built to produce fixed, standard outputs – they’re not designed to reproduce invoices in different structures, layouts and delivery methods for every customer and country. Giving ERPs the ability to do this means customising them format by format.
When these customisations are made, however, they require extensive maintenance, usually from a small number of developers. Each new format adds to their workload and adds layers of complexity to the ERP system.
The effects of this are felt by various departments. Finance has to deal with a slow, expensive process that increases the cost per invoice, and IT is left fielding support tickets and additional maintenance work. As many as 44% of organisations say their ERP is inflexible, and 92% of ERP systems are a bottleneck for CIOs because they often require manual or programmatic intervention to share data.
The ERP does its own job well, but when it comes to e-invoicing, it needs a little outside help.
How to bring the cost back under control
The answer isn’t more customisation inside the ERP – it’s to separate document generation, validation and delivery from the ERP, so it happens in a layer that sits alongside it.
Here’s how it works: Invoice data is extracted from your ERP and transformed into the format and layout each customer requires. For manufacturers transitioning from paper to electronic invoices, this creates a consistent process for generating structured, compliant documents without rebuilding the ERP. The invoice is then validated before it is sent to catch errors before rejection, before being delivered through the correct network, platform or access point.
All of this runs in one platform rather than through custom ERP code, so adding or changing format doesn’t require custom development work. That’s where Lasernet for manufacturing comes in.
Lasernet gives manufacturers a single platform to manage every invoice format without customising core systems:
Integration with your existing ERP
Lasernet integrates with your existing ERP system, whether you use Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance & Operations, Business Central, Customer Engagement, IFS, SAP or Infor, with no changes to the systems you rely on day in, day out.
Every format your customers need
Lasernet creates compliant invoices in whatever format is required – generate a PDF for one customer or a network-delivered e-invoice for another.
Low-code document design
Customer-specific layouts and fields are designed in a low-code interface, so anyone can adjust formats, regardless of their technical proficiency. There’s no need to raise an IT support ticket.
Validation before sending
Invoices are validated before they are sent to the recipient, which reduces the number of rejections your team has to spend valuable time rectifying.
Flexible delivery
Lasernet supports multiple delivery models, including PEPPOL, certified access points, government platforms (such as Poland’s KSeF and France’s Chorus Pro), API, SFTP and email.
Real-time status tracking
See whether an invoice has been accepted, rejected or disputed in real time and benefit from an audit trail that verifies when and how an invoice was transmitted.
How manufacturers can manage the cost of different invoice formats
Supporting many invoice formats is a structural, recurring cost rather than a one-off project, and these costs grow with every new customer and market you serve. Building each new format into your ERP only deepens reliance on manual work and custom coding, which makes your system more expensive to run and riskier to change.
The better fix is a transformation and validation layer that sits over an ERP rather than inside it, so a new format becomes a configuration matter, not a major development job. With up to a 50% reduction in TCO for document processing, up to a 35% productivity increase by reducing manual processes and up to a 40% reduction in paper-based documentation, manufacturers see tangible benefits when they choose Lasernet.
Where to go from here
In terms of next steps, it’s worth auditing where your business currently stands:
After taking a good look at their current invoicing processes, many manufacturers find the cost is higher than they expected. With new e-invoicing mandates arriving later in 2026 and in 2027, invoicing costs will continue to rise. Managing every format through one process, rather than a complex patchwork of manual work and custom code, will reduce costs, ensure compliance and increase approvals.
Take control of invoicing by managing every format in a single platform. Book a personalised demo to see Lasernet in action.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is PEPPOL e-invoicing?
Pan-European Public Procurement Online (PEPPOL), a global network and framework for exchanging electronic invoices, lets businesses and governments automatically transmit structured machine-readable invoices (also known as e-invoices) from the network to the recipient’s system securely and efficiently.
What are e-invoicing requirements?
E-invoicing requirements are the rules that determine how an invoice must be structured, what fields it must contain and how it must be delivered. In the legal context, e-invoicing requirements are set by governments.
Structured e-invoicing has three main requirements: a compliant data model (often aligning to EN 16931 in Europe), a delivery and exchange mechanism (PEPPOL, clearance platforms or state-approved platforms), and stricter data and timing requirements (near-real time reporting to tax authorities).
What is e-invoicing compliance?
E-invoicing compliance means meeting your business’s legal obligations and technical rules for e-invoices in every market you operate in. E-invoicing compliance rules vary by country. For example, Poland has a clearance model where invoices must be issued through the government’s KSeF platform, whereas Germany’s e-invoicing operates on a decentralised, post-audit system, where businesses exchange XRechnung or ZUGFeRD e-invoices directly with no clearance step.
Why can't my ERP produce different invoice formats?
ERPs can’t produce all the e-invoicing formats businesses need natively because they use rigid internal data fields and they aren’t regularly updated for the constant compliance updates by global tax authorities. E-invoicing software, on the other hand, can produce different formats and stay up to date with regulatory changes.
What are common reasons invoices get rejected?
The most common reasons invoices get rejected are failed schema validation (such as an invalid date format), incorrect VAT numbers and mismatched references (a PO number that doesn’t match the buyer’s order).
