As the year draws to a close, we would like to use this blog post to review the past twelve months and give you an insight into 2021 at GetMyInvoices. Even though “remote” and “home office” were once again the focus due to the Corona pandemic, we and our team once again demonstrated enormous strength - from founding a new company to optimizing our solution to organizing new webinars and much more. In addition to giving you a look behind the scenes, we also want to show you where our journey will lead in 2022.
These topics shaped our year:
Table of contents:
- Milestones 2021
- Our team
- Feature highlights
- Numerous new interfaces
- Optimized scanning app
- Events
- Outlook for 2022
Milestones 2021
New society in the USA
Due to the high demand in other countries, we founded our own company, GetMyInvoices Inc., in Wilmington (Delaware, USA) right at the beginning of the year. We chose a rather unconventional approach and did not bring any investors or staff on board.
We also did not start any direct sales activities and instead pursued a co-creation approach. This means that our customers suggest interfaces that our developers implement within a very short time. This strategy has already proven successful in the German market and that is why we want to establish it in the USA as well.
Just two months after our market entry, we had three-digit new customers, a competent English-speaking support team and lots of positive feedback. We are still working with various partners on collaborations and activities in order to conquer the market on the other side of the “big pond” step by step.
Invoice Management Study
We also conducted a study on invoice management at the beginning of the year. The main result was that small and medium-sized companies in Germany are open to technologies that simplify invoice management, but are still far from exploiting their potential for automating work steps.
For example, 39 percent of participants said they needed 11 to 19 hours per month to process invoices. Ten percent even said it took 20 to 50 hours. 41 percent said that searching for invoices, 28 percent entering information from receipts and 11 percent forwarding the receipts were particularly time-consuming. Many companies have to post receipts - the majority (47 percent) have between 11 and 20 copies per month.
When it comes to managing invoices, 45 percent said they scan analogue invoices; 15 percent print out digital invoices and file them. As a result of these results, we have set ourselves the goal of doing even more educational work on digital invoice management and systematically supporting companies in its introduction.
Our team
Our family is growing at the same rate as our company. In January, we brought Marc Wiedbrauck onto our team. As Performance Manager, he drives GetMyInvoices’ online marketing forward. He uses key figures to determine where visitors to our website come from and where they drop off, and optimizes our websites based on the relevant analyses.
In addition, Marc initiates campaigns to increase traffic and generate leads as economically as possible. He also helps create pages and develop content. His passion is discovering and trying out new things. He found us because his previous employer used GetMyInvoices and he wanted to work for a company where he could “put more horsepower on the road”.
Our HR manager Rebecca März has also been on board full-time since July. Rebecca finds it very exciting to accompany the employee cycle from entry to exit and to be involved in the development of the company culture. She has always had her eye on fino with its development opportunities for every team member.
She takes care of typical HR issues such as job advertisements, employment contracts, cell phone contracts, bike leasing and employment references. She also prepares the payroll accounting in order to create transparency for every team member and thus the conditions for the best possible work. She was particularly pleased that she was able to select and introduce a new recruiting tool shortly after being hired at GetMyInvoices.
In addition, our long-awaited offsite meeting finally took place in September at our cradle in Lübeck. Here we said goodbye to our everyday work for two days and used the time to work on new structures and concepts. To celebrate a successful workshop, our coaches gave us free champagne as a souvenir ?.
Our meeting was rounded off with a very interesting tour of the Hanseatic city. It was great to see each other again after such a long time and to chat over dinner together. We hope, of course, that we can see each other more regularly next year.
Feature highlights
Banking module – automatic assignment of invoices and transactions
Our Banking module , which we launched in December 2020, received an extension in January. Since then, users have been able to create their own receipts, for example, if the original has been lost. They also have the option of uploading account transactions to GetMyInvoices that are older than 90 days and assigning them to the corresponding invoices.
In order to offer our Austrian customers an even better service, we support the OFX file format for manual upload of transaction data. As a further highlight, since February customer data has been available at Solarisbank AG and thus also at other banking platforms such as Kontist, Tomorrow, Penta, Finom or Bitwala via our Universal Bank Access module in GetMyInvoices.
New dashboard – intuitive & individual
We have optimized our dashboard in many ways to make the user interface even friendlier. It adapts to the current user, their activated features and their permissions. This means that everything important is visible at a glance immediately after logging in. Bank account balances can be hidden to protect sensitive financial information.
The Logo API from fino, which we have integrated into GetMyInvoices, also ensures an even better user experience. This automatically integrates the current logos of the companies and portals created, so that they are immediately recognizable and give the user even faster orientation.
Workflow module – digital review & approval processes
We were particularly proud of one new feature this year - our workflow module. After a long wait, the time had come in July: our digital review and approval processes finally went live. These map the invoice approval process and the payment run completely digitally and include various user roles.
Under “Document approvals”, users can choose from predefined approval processes or generate individual workflows using the expert mode. There is the option of defining cost limits so that, for example, invoices over €1,000 can only be approved by a selected person.
Furthermore, the “Payment runs” function enables the definition of personal payment runs that can be applied to the approval processes. The launch was accompanied by our regular Workflow Webinars Every Wednesday at 3 p.m. our product specialists show the different settings and areas of application of the digital inspection and approval processes. A tool that may also be useful for your everyday business.
Numerous new interfaces
Over the course of the year, we have also placed a focus on partnerships and cooperation. Our tool now also has export interfaces to the document management system d.velop , to the digital workplace solution Amagno , the ERP and CRM system clap , to the data transfer system of hmd software , to the business management platform Holded and the collaboration solution Microsoft SharePoint .
For the import of documents, our developers have interfaces to the open source solution Invoice Ninja and the cloud software MOCO In addition, a bidirectional document exchange with the all-in-one agency software HQ possible.
Since this year, online retailers have been able to import receipts resulting from product sales on various online platforms and shop systems into GetMyInvoices. These include Shopware, PrestaShop, OpenCart, OXID, xt:Commerce, Shopify, Ecwid, BigCommerce and WooCommerce. The automatic retrieval of outgoing invoices from marketplaces such as Amazon, Alibaba or Rakuten is also an important function. This gives our customers more time to concentrate on their online business.
At the request of our users, we have also connected more than a hundred other online portals. Confluent, ContractHero, DEVK, Oracle Cloud, TikTok Ads, Trivago and Doodly are just a few examples.
Optimized scanning app
Also ours Scan App for iOS for iOS received an extremely useful update from us. Since then, documents stored in GetMyInvoices are recognized directly, so that no duplicates are created when uploading via the app. For even greater user-friendliness, users can import invoices into GetMyInvoices from other applications, such as the photo and document folder on their own smartphone, and secure the scan app with Face ID, Touch ID or PIN.
Events
Accounting Summit
The Accounting Summit in Berlin was the first in-person event that we were finally able to attend again since January 2020. As third place winners, we were able to take home one of the popular trophies at the Accounting Summit Start-up Awards.
Our Head of Sales Jan Moritz Wagner as well as Sales & Support Manager Jan-Niklas Sickes and Marco Paparella, Head of Business Development, presented GetMyInvoices at this trade fair and conference for digitalization and innovation in accounting. It became very clear to us that GetMyInvoices is on an excellent path to positioning itself as an autopilot for preparatory accounting. Some other providers do offer individual functions, but cannot offer the same range of functions as we do.
In addition to our receipt retrieval from more than 10,000 online portals, we have created add-ons such as paying from the invoice management software and workflow functions that make GetMyInvoices unique. We are really proud of that.
DATEV Marketplace Expo** **
We were also present at the DATEV Marketplace Expo in Munich and Berlin. We have fond memories of these events because we were able to talk to many interested parties. We picked up and passed on numerous ideas so that tax consultants and their clients can work together digitally and automatically even more easily and quickly in the future.
Partner Webinars
In order to guarantee an even better customer result, numerous online seminars were held in cooperation with our partners, including Odoo, Agicap, Amagno, sevDesk, DocuWare, MOCO and CAYA. For one hour each, we showed users the various advantages of our interfaces and provided numerous tips and tricks on the topics of invoice, liquidity and document management.
Outlook for 2022
Things are set to continue like this and even better next year. We hope for a good deal more normality and to be able to attend face-to-face events more often. For example, we are really looking forward to the Tax Advisor Expo in March. But we are also continuing our events online. We are planning various activities for our users with partners.
Of course, we are also constantly working on new features and optimizing existing modules. We also want to create additional interfaces to connect new online portals. Our core market will continue to be in the DACH region. Regardless of this, we want to implement campaigns in the rest of Europe and further expand and strengthen our presence in the USA. So it remains exciting 🙂 .
For January, we are initially looking forward to a new office in Kassel. We want to offer our team another attractive place to meet. At the same time, we will continue to live our “remote culture”. Because we have digitalization in our DNA and are primarily concentrating on where we want to go. Everyone can work at flexible times from where they can be most productive in order to achieve great things together as a team.
