Estonia, Financial Services, Good for Business, Internet, Technology

Four years ago, the Estonian ICT cluster initiated a real-time economy project titled Internet of Business (IoB) with a vision to develop a secure and convenient environment for automated real-time business transactions. On the initiative of the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Communications and in collaboration with private and public sector experts in Estonia, the Real-Time Economy Vision and Plan of Action for 2020-2027 has also been developed, IKT said in a press release on Monday.

The next phase of the IoB project involves business software and accounting service providers, with whom the plan is to move from e-invoicing to the standardization of all business transactions. In order to create necessary preconditions for data-driven reporting with the public sector and enable companies to exchange machine-readable transaction information, the standard XBRL Global Ledger Taxonomy framework has been confirmed.

The same standard is implemented also in the Estonian Tax and Customs Board "Aruandlus 3.0" (Reporting 3.0) project. To simplify the process of the adoption of the standard, a new MyCompanyData service will be launched.

"With real-time economy solutions such as e-invoice, e-receipt, e-waybill, data-driven reporting etc., it is possible to save up to 14 million working hours a year that is equivalent to full-time jobs of approximately 7,000 employees," Eero Kaarik, development manager at the company Account Studio, said.

The automation of business transactions makes the economic environment more transparent, predictable and secure, resulting in many positive outcomes such as increased added value and credibility among businesses, better quality of services, as well as reducing human errors and fraud.

The Internet of Business project partners are the nonprofit ITL Digital Lab, the Association of Estonian Accountants, Tieto Estonia AS, Fitek AS, Columbus Eesti AS, BCS Itera AS, Account Studio OU, SimplBooks OU, and OU Skriining.

In 2020, activities of the project continue with the support of a grant of the European Commission's CEF Telecom 2019 Program: eInvoicing in the amount of 953,584 euros, of which 75 percent is co-financed.

Previously the Internet of Business project has received support from the Interreg Baltic Sea Region Seed Money program in 2016 and from the CEF Telecom 2016 Program: eInvoicing, in  2017.