Compliance keeps our customers up at night .We hear this time and again in our conversations with the businesses we serve. As governments implement new legislation, regulations, and e-invoice mandates, business leaders are facing a compelling need to implement new processes to address them. And many don’t know where to begin.
At our recent Basware Bespoke event, our CEO, Jason Kurtz, invited Markus Hornburg, SVP of global compliance, to outline the ways in which Basware is working to simplify and streamline compliance processes for our customers.
The following conversation has been lightly edited for brevity and clarity.
Jason Kurtz: We’ve all heard the saying, ‘Never waste a good crisis,’ and government mandates are, in essence, a crisis – a force-pending event that companies have to take advantage of. How can customers do that in a strategic way?
Markus Hornburg: If you just go after the mandates, you end up with a disaster in the software space called customization. You're starting to customize your own internal processes to an extent that you will have island solutions in every country.
At Basware, we want to give you a global standard process where, underneath the hood, everything works smoothly, and you're compliant with these requirements and mandates. You don’t have to stay up at night because you have a strategy, through the use of Basware, to respond to mandates globally. We don’t guarantee compliance; no vendor can. But we are giving you a platform to operate on that helps you achieve everything you want to achieve while responding to these mandates.
JK: It sounds like there’s a real change management element to that.
MH: Yes, thanks for raising that point. If you tell a person who’s used to touching paper, “Tomorrow that paper is gone, and you will look at a screen,” that is change management. The most important aspect for successful services to be rendered and for successful projects to be delivered is that you need to have everyone on board, down to the AP clerk. Employees all need to be informed about the objective and the strategy.
JK: Let’s get specific on that point. Who are the stakeholders we need to bring together as part of the change management process, and how do we facilitate that conversation?
MH: If you want to set yourself up for success, get all stakeholders on board: procurement, because they own the supplier relationship; AP, because they have to deal with the processing; audit, because they have to look for the integrity of the process; and, of course, endorsement from both the chief procurement officer and the chief financial officer, which helps these projects be delivered successfully.
JK: Tell us about the complexities Basware takes away from our clients.
MH: Monitoring seems to be the most important thing. Our customers want to know everything about a mandate, so let us deal with the complexities of format methods, of getting certified in a certain country, of getting the process approved. That is not part of the daily business of our customers, but it is our core business at Basware. So as a customer of Basware, you can rest assured that we have 24/7 surveillance on the market. There’s no option for us to not know what is going on in any given country.
JK: So if you’re one of our customers, what should be your next step?
MH: Talk to us, because it’s all about communication. Do not embark on your own creative interpretation of legislation. Speak to the experts. We are experts in this field, and we get external support from official experts, as well. So that’s an investment you don’t have to make as a customer.
And when you have a question, email us at HelpMeWithCompliance@basware.com. It will land on the desk of our team members responsible for compliance at Basware, and we can respond directly to your questions.
For more insights from this conversation, watch the full session from Basware Bespoke here.
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