Most companies would describe their billing process as digital. Invoices are sent by email, saved as PDFs, and reviewed on screen. However, behind this impression often lies a process that is less paper-based than expected. The data on the invoice still needs to be captured, checked, and corrected. This is where the costs per invoice arise, distributed across personnel time, inquiries, and corrections, without them being visible in a metric. This paper shows where these costs arise in the invoice entry, what structural factors contribute to them, and how to reduce them. E-invoices change the deadlines for PDF invoices and how to realistically estimate your own costs per invoice.

Costs of processing invoices manually: Why a PDF is not yet an e-invoice

A PDF invoice is designed for humans, not machines. It displays the invoice number, amounts, and items on one page, but it does not provide these data as data that an accounting system can directly process. Before the invoice is booked, someone must enter the relevant fields, either manually or using text recognition, the result of which must then be checked. The costs in the invoice entry therefore occur in the same places as before on paper. The invoice is retrieved from the mailbox, entered, factually reviewed, forwarded for approval, booked, and archived. Many companies or service providers have already partially automated these steps. Nevertheless, each step costs time, and at each point a mistake can prolong the process. If the text recognition reads an amount incorrectly, a delivery number is missing, or the cost item does not match, the invoice ends up in the demand loop.

The distinction is also legally clear. Since then 1 January 2025 In Germany, only an invoice in a structured electronic format is considered an e-invoice that allows for automatic processing, for example: XRechnung or ZUGFeRD. A PDF without embedded structured data counts as an other invoice.

A simple calculation example shows how quickly the effort adds up. Let’s say a company receives around 100,000 incoming invoices per year, almost all of them in PDF format. If it takes ten minutes on average to capture, monitor, and answer questions for each invoice, that’s just under 17,000 hours of work per year. For companies with several hundred thousand invoices per year, this amount of work multiplies accordingly.

Automating invoice entry: Structured data instead of text recognition

With a structured e-invoice, the recording step is eliminated because the information already exists as machine-readable data. The system does not have to recognize where the amount is on the page; it reads the corresponding field directly. This reduces both the time required and the error rate.

The transition from paper-based to electronic, automated invoice processing reduces process costs by 60 to 80 percent; the investment usually pays off within 0.5 to 1.5 years (Billentis Market Report, 2026). Those who already process PDF invoices today save less when switching because the need for mail and scanning has already disappeared. The biggest cost bottleneck remains the manual recording and control of data; however, the structured e-invoice replaces this step.

However, the actual savings amount does not depend solely on the format, but also on the quality of the data. Standard data such as VAT IDs, tax codes, or bank details become a compliance issue in automated invoice verification. Errors that were silently corrected during the manual verification of a PDF now result in an invoice being automatically rejected. The same applies to reference fields such as order number, project number, or cost center. If these are missing or are filled in inconsistently, even a technically flawless system cannot assign the invoice, and it is returned to manual processing.

E-invoicing transition period: Until when PDF invoices are still allowed

From January 1, 2025, all companies in Germany must Receive e-invoices can. For the Shipping There are transitional periods in which PDF invoices are still allowed in domestic B2B business. Until the end of 2026, all companies may still issue so-called „other invoices,“ i.e., paper or PDF invoices. In 2027, this will only apply to companies with a maximum of 800,000 euros in annual turnover; starting in 2028, e-invoicing will be mandatory for all.

For invoice receipt, this means that PDF invoices won’t disappear overnight; however, their share is decreasing with each deadline. Anyone who has still aligned their receipt process to PDF is running two processes in parallel during this phase and is bearing the costs for both of them.

E-invoicing market share in Germany and Europe: growth until 2030

The development is not limited to Germany. In Europe, the volume of electronic B2B invoices will increase from 17.2 to 26.3 billion by 2030, an increase of 53 percent (Billentis Market Report, 2026). This growth is driven by the broad coverage through regulatory mandates and by countries that are still in the transition phase. For companies with European suppliers or customers, this means that structured invoices will become the norm in international business as well.

Digitalization Value Added Tax EU: Why tax authorities rely on structured data

Tax administrations also benefit from structured accounting data. Through so-called Continuous Transaction Controls, companies report their invoices to the authorities in real time or almost in real time. Greece has been running the myDATA platform since 2020 and has reduced its VAT gap from 29 percent in 2017 to around 9 percent in 2024 (EU Commission, „Mind the Gap“). Companies and tax authorities thus draw different benefits from the same data, which one benefits from in terms of process costs and liquidity, while the other benefits from it in terms of compliance and fraud prevention.

ROI E-Invoice: How to offset your own costs per invoice

For a first assessment, you do not need an elaborate cost analysis. Three questions are sufficient as a starting point: How many incoming invoices does your company process per year, and how many of them come as PDFs? How much time overall is spent on capturing, checking, reviewing, and approving? How often do recognition errors, missing information, or questions delay a process? Multiply the time spent by the internal personnel costs and divide the result by the number of invoices. This gives you a first estimate of your costs per invoice and shows which portion corresponds to manual data entry.

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