Since the year is coming to an end, we would like to review the past twelve months in this blog article and thus give you a glimpse into the year 2021 of GetMyInvoices. Even though “remote” & “home office” were once again in the spotlight given the Corona pandemic, we have once again demonstrated enormous strength with our team – from founding a new company to optimizing our solution to hosting new webinars and much more. While taking a look behind our scenes, we also want to show you where our journey will take us in 2022.
In response 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. In doing so, we opted for a rather unconventional approach and did not bring any investors or personnel on board.
We also did not launch any direct sales activities and instead pursued a co-creation approach. This means that our customers suggest interfaces, which our developers implement within a very short time. This strategy has already proven successful in the German market, which is why we want to establish it in the U.S. as well.
Just two months after our market entry, we had new customers in the triple-digit range, a competent English-speaking support team, and lots of positive feedback in our interim balance sheet. We are still working with various partners on cooperations and activities to conquer the market on the other side of the “big pond” step by step.
Early this year, we also conducted a study on invoice management. The key finding was that small and medium-sized enterprises in Germany are open to technologies for simplifying invoice management, but are still far from exploiting their potential for automating work steps.
For example, 39 percent of the participants stated that they spend eleven to 19 hours per month processing invoices. For ten percent, the figure is as high as 20 to 50 hours. Of these, 41 percent estimated that searching for invoices, 28 percent that gathering information from receipts and eleven percent that forwarding receipts were particularly time-consuming. Many companies have to post cash receipts – for the largest proportion (47 percent), this involves between eleven and 20 copies per month.
In terms of managing invoices, 45 percent said they scan analog invoices; 15 percent print out digital invoices and file them. As a consequence of these results, we have set ourselves the goal of doing even more educational work around digital invoice management and systematically taking companies by the hand during the introduction.
As our company grows, so does our family. So in January, we brought Marc Wiedbrauck onto our team. As Performance Manager, he drives GetMyInvoices’ online marketing. He uses key figures to determine where visitors to our website come from and where they drop off and optimizes our web pages based on corresponding analyses.
In addition, Marc initiates campaigns to increase traffic and generate leads as economically as possible. He also contributes to the creation of pages and content development. His passion lies in discovering and trying out new things. By the way, he found his way to us because his former employer was using GetMyInvoices and he wanted to work in a company where he could “put more horsepower on the road”.
Since July, our HR Manager Rebecca März has also been on board full-time. Rebecca finds it very exciting to accompany the employee cycle from entry to beyond exit and to participate in the development of the company culture. fino, with its development opportunities for every team member, has always had her “in mind”.
She takes care of typical HR issues such as job postings, employment contracts, cell phone contracts, bike leasing, and job references. She also prepares the payroll accounting to create transparency here for each team member and thus the conditions for the best possible work. She was especially pleased to be able to select and implement a new recruiting tool shortly after joining GetMyInvoices.
In addition, our long-awaited offsite meeting finally took place in our cradle in Lübeck in September. Here we said goodbye to our daily work routine for two days and used the time to work on new structures and concepts. To celebrate a successful workshop, we got free champagne as a souvenir from our coaches ?.
Our meeting was rounded off with a very interesting guided tour of the Hanseatic city. It was super nice to meet again after such a long time and chat over dinner together. We hope, of course, that we can see each other more regularly next year.
Our banking module, which we had already launched in December 2020, received an enhancement in January. Since then, users can, for example, create their receipts if the original has been lost. Furthermore, they have the option to upload account transactions to GetMyInvoices that are already older than 90 days and assign them to the associated invoices.
To offer our Austrian customers an even better service, we support the OFX file format for manual uploads of transaction data. As a further highlight, since February customer data at Solarisbank AG and thus also at other banking platforms, such as Konsist, Tomorrow, Penta, Finom, or Bitwala, can be accessed via our Universal Bank Access module in GetMyInvoices.
For an even friendlier user interface, we have optimized our dashboard in many ways. It adapts individually to the current user, his activated features, and his permissions. Immediately after logging in, all essentials are visible at first glance. Bank account balances can be hidden to protect sensitive financial information.
For an even better user experience, we have integrated fino’s logo API into GetMyInvoices. This automatically integrates the current logos of the companies and portals created, so that they are immediately recognizable and give the user an even faster orientation.
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 represent the invoice approval process as well as the payment run completely digitally and include different user roles.
Under “Document Approvals”, for example, users can choose from predefined approval processes or generate individual workflows via the expert mode. There is also the option of defining cost limits so that, for example, invoices of more than €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 application areas of the digital review & approval processes. A tool that may also be useful for your everyday business.
During the year, we also placed a focus on partnerships and cooperations. For example, our tool now also has export interfaces to the document management system d.velop, the digital workplace solution Amagno, the ERP and CRM system weclapp, the data transfer system from hmd-Software, the business management platform Holded and the collaboration solution Microsoft SharePoint.
For importing documents, our developers have created interfaces to the open-source solution Invoice Ninja and the cloud software MOCO. In addition, bidirectional document exchange with the all-in-one agency software HQ is now possible.
Online merchants can import receipts resulting from product sales on various online platforms and store systems into GetMyInvoices as of this year. These include Shopware, PrestaShop, OpenCart, OXID, xt:Commerce, Shopify, Ecwid, BigCommerce, and WooCommerce, for example. Automatic retrieval of outgoing invoices from marketplaces such as Amazon, Alibaba, or Rakuten is also an important feature. This gives our customers more time to focus 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.
Our scan app for iOS also 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 more user-friendliness, users can import invoices into GetMyInvoices from other apps, such as the photo and document folder on their smartphone, and secure the scanning app with Face ID, Touch ID, or PIN as desired.
The Accounting Summit in Berlin was the first presence event since January 2020 that we were finally able to attend again. As part of the Accounting Summit Start-up Awards, we were able to take home one of the popular trophies as third-place winners.
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. There it became very clear to us that GetMyInvoices is on an excellent path to position itself as an autopilot for preparatory accounting. Some other vendors have individual features in their offerings, but they can’t match our feature set.
In addition to our document retrieval from more than 10,000 online portals, we’ve created add-ons that make GetMyInvoices unique, including payment from within the invoice management software and workflow features. We are very proud of that.
DATEV Marketplace Expo
We were also present at the DATEV Marketplace Expo in Munich and in 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 impulses so that tax consultants and their clients can collaborate even more easily and quickly in the future, digitized and automated.
To guarantee an even better customer experience, 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 conveyed numerous tips & tricks on the topics of invoicing, liquidity, and document management, among others.
This is how things should continue in the coming year, and even better. We hope for a bit more normality and to be able to participate more often in face-to-face events again. For example, we are already looking forward to the Tax Advisor Expo in March. But we are also continuing our events online. Together with our partners, we are planning various activities for our users.
Of course, we are also continuously working on new features and the optimization of existing modules. In addition, we want to implement further interfaces to connect new online portals. Our core market will continue to be the DACH region. Independently of this, we want to implement campaigns in the rest of Europe as well as 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 would like to offer our team another attractive place to meet. At the same time, we continue to live our “remote culture”. After all, we have digitization in our DNA and focus first and foremost on where we want to go. Everyone is allowed to work at flexible times from wherever they can be most productive to achieve great things together as a team.
See the benefits of automated invoice management:
Better overview. Less accounting work. More time for your ideas.
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