Tradeshift to work with NHS SBS
Tradeshift to work with NHS SBS to deal with up to 30,000 invoices a day converting suppliers to submitting invoices electronically and reducing the burden on NHS resources.
Thursday 30th April 2015

NHS SBS, a business support company, has turned to Tradeshift to help them deal electronically with up to the 30,000 paper invoices a day.

Tradeshift’s e-invoicing platform is free for suppliers and aims to have the look and feel of social media sites like Facebook. It also works on mobile phones and tablets.

By asking NHS suppliers to submit and track their invoices electronically, payments can be made more quickly, reducing the burden on NHS resources. NHS SBS provides business support to the NHS in finance and accounting, employment services, procurement and

The NHS deals with 200,000 suppliers every day. It handles 7m paper invoices a year and estimates that each invoice uses approximately two sheets of paper. If the NHS hit 100% adoption of e-invoicing, it would eliminate roughly 14m sheets of paper a year – plus envelopes.

Thousands of suppliers have been recruited to e-invoicing and the new system has almost eradicated the use of paper invoices. It has cut turnaround time for invoices and the new platform is more efficient than paper because it does not allow incomplete invoices to be submitted.

The procedure requires suppliers to complete 15 checks against categories including tax, amount, date and invoice number. This is often where errors occur when suppliers produce invoices. The system works rather like booking a plane journey – you input all the relevant information at the start, and can’t move on until you’ve entered everything correctly.

Tradeshift also delivers alerts to suppliers, which has led to a reduction in the number of calls querying invoices.

The project has been a huge undertaking because of the size of the NHS supplier network. But, by reducing paper use, it is fully in step with the broader digital strategy of the NHS.