Unlocking global e-invoicing: How enterprises can scale strategically

E-invoicing mandates are accelerating across the world. Over the past year alone, countries across Europe, Latin America, and the Middle East have introduced or expanded real-time reporting, clearance models, and post-audit frameworks — each with its own technical and operational requirements. With more mandates on the horizon, the pace of change is only increasing, and the diversity of models makes compliance a significant challenge for any enterprise operating across borders.

That’s why successful e-invoicing adoption must start with strategy. Throughout the E-Invoicing Unlock webinar series with Avalara and Workday, Matt Hammond, General Manager of E-Invoicing at Avalara; Eric Wilson, Senior Director of Product Strategy at Workday; Paul Abeton, Principal Product Manager at Workday; Duane Orridge, Senior Director of Global Sales at Avalara; and Wyatt Edge-Morgan, Senior Partner, Workday Financials at Cloud Rock, explored the foundational elements businesses need in place before launching an international e-invoicing programme. 

Across the series, one message comes through clearly: compliance isn’t a country-by-country checklist. It’s a continuous capability — one that requires anticipation rather than reaction, and a strategic approach grounded in standard global processes with room for local flexibility.

• E-invoicing is no longer a local compliance effort — it’s a global capability. To stay ahead of fast-moving mandates, enterprises must shift from a reactive to a strategic mindset. 
• A standard global process with local configuration is the most scalable approach. Workday’s ERP-native framework combined with Avalara’s single integration for multicountry mandates enables repeatability and consistency.  
• Compliance and automation are converging. Real-time data, unified processes, and embedded auditability unlock efficiency, reduce risk, and strengthen cross-functional collaboration. 

When businesses take a tactical approach to e-invoicing, they react slowly and reach for quick-fix solutions for a specific market before moving on. Such solutions may bring short-term compliance, but they’re often expensive, risky, and unsustainable — and they rarely provide the ability to scale for the next country. Projects can stall as multiple stakeholders with different objectives pull in different directions and fail to align on key decisions.

Instead, businesses should give themselves as much time as possible and take a strategic approach. To harmonise compliance across multiple markets, e-invoicing should be treated as a finance transformation project, not just a tax compliance exercise. That means forming a central team with a dedicated budget and executing globally. Managing centrally — and thinking of e-invoicing as a global process with a global owner — provides long-term scalability.

Executive sponsorship is also critical. A strong governance layer at the top keeps everyone accountable and moving in the same direction. This can be the difference between success and failure. “Treat this as a finance transformation project, not just a tax compliance effort,” says Matt Hammond. “Form a central team and budget, and execute the project globally, while including local participants for nuance. Managing centrally is more effort up front but gives long-term scalability. Think of it as a global process with a global owner, not just a rollout.”

When reviewing vendors, it’s not enough to simply count how many countries they cover. You should look at the underlying technology, how it supports global consistency, and whether it enables compliance to be integrated into their digital transformation — not bolted on as an afterthought. Define your global standard processes and configure local exceptions only where needed. This is where the right ERP is key.

Leveraging a modern ERP like Workday, built with global frameworks at the core, allows you to define a single global process with configurable localisations to meet country-specific requirements.

An ERP like Workday centralises data and processes, ensuring that financial, tax, and compliance information is consistent, accurate, and available in real time across all teams. Because compliance and workflows are embedded directly into the system, tax rules, validations, and approvals are part of the invoicing process from the start. A unified data model removes silos, minimises duplicate solutions, simplifies change management, and provides the agility needed to adapt quickly to multiregional regulatory changes — all while supporting smooth cross-functional collaboration.

Businesses should “...standardise as much as you can, and only localise when you absolutely have to,” says Paul Abeton. “Standardisation enables efficiency and scalability. It lets you leverage repeatable processes across regions, reducing cost and complexity.” 

Workday provides a generic e-invoicing connector that customers can use to meet country-specific mandates. However, if you operate in multiple countries with varying requirements, building and maintaining individual connectors for each one quickly becomes a major effort. Having a single integration with a Workday partner like Avalara allows you to integrate once and connect to multiple e-invoicing platforms globally, supporting all mandates through a single, scalable integration.

ERP-native capabilities make it possible to roll out e-invoicing globally without relying on a patchwork of disconnected tools. “The traditional response we’ve seen is a bespoke solution for each mandate,” says Eric Wilson. “France is coming? Spin up a project just for France. Hire a consultancy or bolt on another tech solution. But that’s expensive, risky, and unsustainable.” Instead of adding a new solution for each market, organisations can extend their ERP’s single source of truth across all regions. 

The key to scaling e-invoicing is keeping as much as possible anchored in ERP-native functionality. With all data, tax logic, and workflows contained within Workday, teams can build once and deploy many times. Standardised global processes can be reused in every region, with only targeted configurations for local rules and formats. Compliance remains embedded at the source: validations and approvals occur inside Workday, strengthening governance, auditability, and issue resolution.

And through strategic integrations — such as Workday’s partnership with Avalara — ERP-native invoicing connects directly to multiple country networks through a single integration. This removes the need for numerous local point solutions and dramatically simplifies global rollout.

Different models across global regions can create significant issues for multinational companies. If you’re doing something different in every country, it quickly becomes unsustainable. At the same time, compliance and automation are converging. You can’t address government mandates without automating processes — and you can’t automate processes anymore without considering compliance. Addressing these mandates will be disruptive, but there are real opportunities for business improvement and efficiency hidden within them. Simply going electronic doesn’t automatically deliver traditional efficiency gains. You have to treat this as both a compliance and automation project.

How centralised governance empowers local compliance 

Consider a manufacturer operating in more than 20 countries, facing upcoming mandates in France, Poland, Belgium, and other countries. The business processes millions of transactions per year across multiple ERP systems and numerous local providers. Centralising gives the CFO visibility into e-invoicing risk across the entire business, with consolidated data in one place and feeding back into the ERP. The need for local expertise can be addressed through Avalara’s certified implementation partner programme. It covers advisory (what’s in scope, what needs to be submitted), functional work (project management, data clean-up), and technical implementation (how to connect with Workday and other systems). It combines local knowledge with a global framework. 

When it comes to execution, businesses must operationalise e-invoicing across geographies, ERP systems, and business units. The following factors typically introduce risk or disrupt core processes: 

Lack of alignment 

Tax, finance, IT, and procurement teams can often be misaligned on the strategy for rolling out a global provider. IT teams may already be overloaded with ERP rollouts, procurement may treat e-invoicing as a tactical point solution, while the head of tax is looking at it strategically. It’s essential for all of these teams to align on goal and vision. 

Bottlenecks 

Businesses can become stuck in implementation backlogs and wait 12–16 weeks just to start their project. With new mandates coming in 2026 and beyond, this can put businesses at risk of noncompliance. Providers with certified implementation partners can help to accelerate deployment.

Reinvention per country 

Local solutions for each market and mandate means every rollout becomes a new project. ‘So each new roll out... delivers some unfortunately high costs and not a true unified platform,’ says Duane Orridge. 

Master data and a single source of truth are essential. Businesses working with 10 local providers in different languages and time zones can find it challenging to get clean, consistent data. On top of that, errors and reconciliation work take time. One area that’s often overlooked is customer support. For B2B and B2C businesses with high volumes, customer support teams aren’t always equipped to handle tax or invoicing queries. These cases escalate to the head of tax or finance and can take days or weeks to resolve.

Managing many local suppliers around the world increases operational overhead and risk: missing submission deadlines, incurring fines, and even damaging your brand.

Balancing efficiency and standardisation with local compliance is a challenge. Businesses should start with a global standard defined across three dimensions:

• Your core process
• Your roles (who does what)
• Your controls and validations

With Workday’s configurable business process framework, you can design the global process, security permissions, and validation rules. For example, in a supplier invoice process, you define what “global” looks like to drive efficiency, reduce processing time, and meet your cost-of-finance benchmarks.

As you add new business units or subsidiaries, they inherit that global baseline — the process, roles (like the accounts payable manager), and validation rules. From there, you configure conditional logic for local requirements. The benefit is you’re maintaining one process with local variations, rather than dozens of separate processes for each country.

Asses your data  

Document your current process and where your data comes from. Before you worry about delivering data to government portals, make sure you’re capturing everything required for each country’s invoicing rules. 

Take stock of existing systems across finance, procurement, and tax

Invoicing technology has evolved in recent years. Review what you already have so you don’t incur unnecessary expense, and weigh the costs of adding technical debt against moving to a modern platform.

Take a holistic view 

This isn’t just about meeting minimum compliance requirements. Use the opportunity to improve business efficiency — focus on error resolution, processing time, and cost of finance, while still meeting compliance obligations.

Real-time e-invoicing provides immediate feedback on whether an invoice has been issued correctly and received — a clear compliance signal. European countries are shifting away from periodic transaction reporting in favour of real-time data collection. “The fact that you’re participating in a real-time electronic invoicing mandate gives instantaneous feedback to the seller on whether the invoice has been issued correctly and received,” says Wyatt Edge-Morgan. “That in itself is very valuable.”

This reduces filing complexity at period or quarter end and frees up finance resources, helping shorten close timelines. Another key benefit is data quality. To issue an e-invoice successfully, the data has to be right. Without accurate VAT numbers and other critical fields, invoices are rejected. The byproduct is a rich set of clean, reliable data that can be used for analytics.

In the tax space, that supports a journey from basic compliance (paying the right VAT to avoid penalties), to improvement (maximising VAT recovery and avoiding unnecessary tax), to transformation (eliminating tax-unfriendly transactions and leveraging low-tax jurisdictions).

By combining e-invoicing data with financial and operational data, organisations can build an analytical framework that delivers strategic insights, allowing tax and finance to influence broader business decisions. 

Embedding auditability into workflows so traceability is inherent, not bolted on

With modern platforms like Workday and Avalara, every process is tracked. Audit is “always on” throughout the lifecycle of a transaction — from origination, to sending to a third party, to filing with the government, to receiving acknowledgement through a certified connector like Avalara’s in Workday. You get full visibility in one place, without compromises.

E-invoicing compliance as strategy 

The E-invoicing Unlock webinar series with Avalara and Workday will be available on-demand. It shows that e-invoicing at scale isn’t just a compliance initiative — it’s a strategic lever for control, efficiency, and agility. Learn more about Avalara E-Invoicing and Live Reporting. You can also speak with Avalara today about overcoming your e-invoicing challenges. 

Why isn’t a country-by-country approach sustainable for e-invoicing?

Because each jurisdiction has different formats, timelines, and technical standards. Managing local tools for every country increases cost, complexity, and compliance risk. A global model with local configuration allows enterprises to scale more efficiently.

How does Workday support global e-invoicing processes?

Workday provides a unified data model, configurable business processes, embedded validations, and a generic e-invoicing connector. These capabilities allow organisations to standardise globally while adapting to country-specific requirements.

Why integrate e-invoicing through Avalara instead of building connectors for every country?

Avalara offers a single Workday e-invoicing integration that connects  to multiple government platforms worldwide. This avoids managing dozens of local solutions, reduces maintenance effort, and ensures rapid readiness as new mandates emerge.

What operational benefits come from real-time e-invoicing data?

Real-time data improves error detection, speeds issue resolution, reduces month-end workloads, and provides accurate, high-quality information. When combined with financial and operational data, it also delivers insights that help finance and tax teams shape business strategy.