Brais Méndez,
CEO and Co-Founder of DOCUTEN
If one thing has become clear, it is that most business strategies were not prepared to withstand a
situation like the one we experienced over the last year.
Countless companies have had to face unexpected obstacles and stresses as a result of the coronavirus, including mobility restrictions, being forced to work remotely, and economic uncertainty. Teams have had to prove their resourcefulness and resilience in the face of unfamiliar terrain and undue pressures. The objective became to find solutions as quickly as possible in an effort to offset the impact of the pandemic on daily operations, results, and stakeholders.
The rate of digital acceleration is proof of this. As the CEO of Telefónica, José María Álvarez Pallete,
stated in an article for Expansión, “the pandemic has accelerated digitalisation between 3 to 5 years".
Recent trends in digitalisation include strategies and solutions to better handle administrative
management and the necessary, recurring, day-to-day operations of companies. It has proven to be one of the areas where companies tend to be less digitalised, and we have verified as much at Docuten from the exponential growth in demand.
The need to work remotely and improve efficiency led many companies to secure our digital signature and electronic invoicing services.
While there was a clear increase in digitalisation, the legality of digital solutions remained of primary
concern for many businesses. At Docuten, our clients not only have the assurance that all our solutions
are covered by the law, but digital transformation makes legal compliance that much easier.
How does administrative digitalisation help comply with current legislation?
We are aware that companies need to comply with current legislation and that is why our solutions are designed to help companies do just that.
Is digital signature legal?
This is one of the most frequently asked questions and unfortunately, misinformation leads companies to distrust digital solutions.
That said, all our signature solutions are covered under Regulation (EU) No 910/2014 of the European
Parliament and of the Council of 23 July 2014 on electronic identification and trust services for
electronic transactions (eIDAS Regulation), as well as with other international regulations. In addition,
we are a European Trust Services Provider, so we can ensure that all our solutions are fully legal and
secure.
In addition to being legally valid, relying on digital signature for labor and commercial documentation
enables you to meet deadlines established by the law, drastically lowers human error, establishes a
single storage point to avoid misplacing documents and helps companies comply with the legal
obligations that affect the signature process.
Lorena Suárez, HR Director at Kimak (Grupo Caamaño) explains how, “all too frequently, due the
geographic dispersion of our workers, the amount of time it took to process documentation wasn’t
allowing us to comply with current legislation and generated a lot of distrust on the part of the worker.
Now, all documentation is sent through the platform to the worker directly and, aside from receiving
the information much sooner, we eliminated any costs associated with printing high volumes of
documents. ...Regarding our stakeholders and clients, we have greatly increased their confidence in us
thanks to the presence of a Trusted Third Party [Trust Services Provider] who validates our signatures".
Is electronic invoicing legal?
For an electronic invoice to be valid, the Regulation on Invoicing in Spain (Royal Decree 1619/2012, of
November 30 _ BOE of the 1st of December) requires the issuer to guarantee, from the date of issue and throughout the entire retention period, the integrity of its content and its legibility.
How do we guarantee this part?
From the point of view of the invoice recipient:
1. Authenticity of origin, which in our case will depend on the reception channel:
- For FACeB2B, a public record remains.
- Via our vendor portal, through the audit records generated by Docuten itself.
- Via email, through the mail sent by the provider.
2. Content integrity - In the case of invoices via OCR, this is achieved by the time stamp when an
invoice is received.
For the other two channels (FACeB2B and the vendor portal), it is achieved through the
electronic signature contained in the invoice.
The requirement of article 7 of Order EHA/962/2007 is fulfilled by points 1 and 2, which leads us to
article 18.1. b) of the Regulation that regulates invoicing obligations. It indicates that said conditions will be accredited by means of an advanced electronic signature. Docuten complies with this by being protected under the eIDAS Regulation and other legal provisions, and by being an Electronic Trust Services Provider.
3. Invoice legibility - This applies to invoices in a structured format like Facturae or UBL where it
must be guaranteed that a human-readable version is available. We offer this, for example, with
the PDF view that we compose from a Facturae.
This doesn’t apply to invoices directly received in PDF version since they are already legible.
Docuten is one of the electronic invoicing services providers verified by the General State
Administration in Spain:
What are the challenges companies face when embarking on
administrative digitalisation?
Thanks to our expertise, at Docuten, we are deeply aware of the challenges that companies face when it comes to administratively managing relationships with vendors, employees and clients.
Our solutions aim to improve these relationships, overcome obstacles and elevate the overall efficiency of the company through a legally compliant, secure and easy-to-use platform.
Vendor management
Within the framework of Docuten’s services, vendor relationships involve both the continuous signing of commercial contracts and the management of invoices. At Docuten, we aim to address both issues.
Digital signature enables our clients to sign contracts quickly and securely, using the type of signature
that best suits their needs, from an advanced electronic signature to a qualified electronic signature.
For clients with multiple vendors, Docuten makes administrative management easier through electronic invoice reception. Companies can use different methods depending on their particular circumstances. With Docuten, you can receive invoices through the FACeB2B channel, through our vendor portal, or as an email with one or more PDFs attached.
Having several different channels reduces complications with vendors and guarantees the success of
transforming the billing process into an automatic, digital one. Offering multiple possibilities to
providers improves harmony and streamlines interactions.
Employee management
Resolving the uncertainty and undue stress on workers caused by the pandemic has been one of the
main focuses of companies during this time. However, businesses shouldn’t only think about the short
term.
Providing workers with the necessary tools to more easily carry out their job duties (especially remotely)is imperative so that they can dedicate their time to activities that provide greater value to the company and eliminate monotonous or unnecessary tasks.
Have you ever stopped to think about how much time your HR department spends managing all the
documentation that must be sent out for signature? And what about the finance department? Have you ever taken stock of the hours involved in handling each individual invoice received?
It is evident that many company administrative management processes cut across several different
departments. Sergio Campillo, Head of People & Process Management at Monbake, indicates that,
“intrinsic to choosing company digitalisation as a way of working is reliance on the people who are part of that transformation, improving their day-to-day operations and creating an attractive place to work.”
Additionally, there are important legal implications to managing labor documentation that must be
signed by workers when they are geographically dispersed since deadlines are not usually met, adds
Lorena Suarez, HR Director at KIMAK. Digitalisation can once again be the solution.
The signing of contracts, 145 forms, leaves of absence or medical leave, job safety documents as well as other paperwork can all be done digitally with any of Docuten’s solutions. These include, but are not limited to, signing with a biometric signature using a touch device (especially practical for companies with physical stores or offices), or signing with an OTP, which allows you to sign securely with a single-use code.
Sergio Campillo, Head of People & Process Management at Monbake, told us how relying on Docuten
has meant “reducing the deadlines to formalise any document that requires legal backing and thus achieving greater efficiency for processes that used to take much longer since documents no longer have to be taken in person to be signed.”
Client management
In addition to managing vendors and workers, it is essential to offer an efficient service to customers.
Many of our clients manage the signing of commercial contracts through electronic signature, which
enables better organisation and greater control over documents. It also helps promote an innovative
vision for clients.
Services such as the qualified signature with a digital certificate, the biometric signature, or the signature with OTP can provide this.
Alternatively, Docuten offers companies the ability to issue electronic invoices to both public and
private clients, which many companies are required to do to fulfill legal obligations.
What Docuten offers companies
At Docuten, we help companies overcome administrative challenges and invest in a paperless culture
through services like digital signature and electronic invoicing (issued and received). These solutions are all easily managed through a single platform that complies with current legislation and allows businesses to improve processing times and deadlines by streamlining the legal compliance of internal operations.
We seamlessly integrate with companies’ systems and work with connectors that enable integration
with the leading ERP solutions on the market (like SAP, Microsoft, and SAGE 2000) so that companies can use our services with the applications they already trust.
From multinationals to smaller companies, we have already helped hundreds of clients eliminate paper from their processes and become more efficient. Clients like Lantania have relied on Docuten to be able to continue working as normal over the last year. Systems Director Emilio Casal said it best: “Thanks to Docuten and the implementation of its services, our processes have not been affected by the pandemic and remote working. Additionally, it has been possible to eliminate paper, decentralise work on the different projects, reduce costs and improve efficiency. Signing contracts and receiving invoices has been made that much more agile.”
We want our clients to benefit from digitalisation, we want them to save up to 80% of costs, to improve their organisational management (thanks to easy document accessibility), to reduce human error, to eliminate paper and improve their carbon footprint and, above all, to trust in the legality of an
established and proven technology.