“As you can see from the title, the E-bill would regulate the electronic payments; however, at the moment most of the invoices issued in Chile are on paper. The paper invoices automatically include the famous ‘fourth copy’, which indicates that a client assigns an invoice to a factor. This ‘fourth copy’ is signed by the buyer upon receipt. Subsequently, a supplier would physically give a hard copy of an invoice to a factor, signed by the buyer, for financing. As such, there is no problem for factoring, as far as paper-based document turnover is concerned.
On the contrary, if a client issues an electronic invoice, currently the buyer could either acknowledge it as received or not. The main problem here is that, in the absence of a uniform database of acknowledged electronic invoices, a factor can’t see such acknowledgements, which makes it difficult for suppliers to apply for factoring finance.
The E-bill was designed to support the Government’s initiative to reduce paper document exchange between Chilean businesses. However, we believe that this intention, though good for the economy, is rather cost intensive. Though larger companies are investing and using e-invoicing systems, the transition to e-invoices is beyond most SMEs’ means. As such, despite being an overall positive development for the economy in general, the E-bill will not influence the current focus of factors; as for the near future, we will continue to deal with mainly paper-based document exchange.”