Business development plan of billonline: where to enter the current market of electronic invoicing software and how can the product ‘billonline’ ideally be offered to this market?

Abstract

DX-Solutions is a West-Flemish based software start-up/scale-up that is founded by Xavier Dekeyster. The company helps other enterprises in the automation of their business processes and helps them to prepare for the digital world that lies ahead. An in-house made e-invoicing tool was launched a couple of years ago, being Billonline. But as this product did not belong to the core business of DX-Solutions, it got a little bit forgotten. Nevertheless, as it is the goal of DX-Solutions to help companies to become quicker and react more efficiently in the digital transformation of today’s world, the product could help SMEs that struggle with efficiently managing their administration. Therefore, this research is necessary for the company to learn, on the one hand, what the possibilities of the product are, and on the other hand, how it can be offered. First insights showed that the global invoicing market is extremely large with 550 billion invoices exchanged yearly. It is even expected that this amount will quadruple against 2035. Nevertheless, only around 10% of all these invoices are exchanged electronically. This already gives a first indication of the enormous potential of e-invoicing. On top, governments all over the world started to work on solutions to increase this adoption of e-invoicing as they saw that this digitalization leads to billions of cost savings per year.Europe couldn’t stay behind on this topic and implemented making e-invoicing the predominant method of invoicing in their Digital Agenda for 2020. As a result, the Belgian government also mandated e-invoicing for any B2G assignments. With an invoicing market of one billion invoices exchanged yearly, this initiative is not only positive to reduce the VAT gap, but it also leads to cost savings of € 3.5 Bio per year. Now, combining these insights from literature with those from extensive quantitative research resulted in some promising possibilities on where to enter the market. Eventually, the construction sector was chosen, based on a large number of construction enterprises in Belgium (and Europe) and the low number of adoption of e-invoicing in this sector. Next, qualitative in-depth interviews were analyzed which resulted in a well-founded value proposition as well as a strong positioning strategy for Billonline regarding its main competitors. At last, by combining all our findings and proposed strategies on where and how to enter the e-invoicing market, a business plan, including a go-to-market strategy and financial forecast, and an investment memorandum, including a funding request and exit strategy, were build to help DX-Solutions to attract investors for Billonline.