Invoicing in micro-mobility business is now simple
Doing micro-mobility business means doing business with hundreds of thousands of customers. On the other hand, expanding into new markets means that your business has to comply with a lot of different regulations. And this is not only in terms of micro-mobility, but also, for example, accounting. However, this might not be as complicated as it sounds provided that you choose the right partner. And Space Invoices could be the partner to choose when considering centralized invoicing.
“Our business is not sexy per se and we understand that invoicing will never be interesting. However, we are interested in devising solutions that are useful for our customers. The less you care about invoicing, the better we are doing our job,” says Space Invoices CEO Boštjan Pišler. With its API solution, the company is helping developers to focus on building software instead of dealing with financial calculations and invoicing legislation.
Space Invoices has two approaches to its business model. When the customer is a multi-tenant business, the company charges per every customer. However, if the customer has a big volume of invoices that are issued monthly, a tiny fee is added for every invoice created. Boštjan says that although the company works with a small number of clients, its service is actually used by about 8,000 businesses across Europe and Australia. It also plans to launch in Brazil and Mexico in the near future, as well as add support for North American countries. Documents can currently be sent in 14 different languages. “As a software provider, we need to ensure while doing business in all those different countries that we also send invoices to the government if needs be. And it is important for companies that operate in these countries that they have a service provider that meets all government requirements.” According to Boštjan, “We do.”
Creates an API that becomes a successful business
Bostjan developed and used to run a classic online invoicing software on the local market. This is where the idea for Space Invoices comes from. There was apparently a need for an easy-to-integrate invoicing API. Bostjan's development agency used a lot of different APIs for different parts of the software they were building for clients, “We managed to create a really good invoicing API for developers. I came up with the idea to create Space Invoices that could be a solution, where there is an existing API and developers can implement it to the software to easily create invoices with a couple of lines of code. We now have a multi-tenant type of approach to the API. If you compare this to traditional solutions, which mostly just add API to invoicing functionality, we rebuild the whole system to support a multi-tenant approach with an API first approach and developers in mind.”
This is how ATOM also uses the system. It is simple for micro-mobility service users because they only need to provide primary data. Afterward, ATOM can automatically create accounts and link them to businesses. Invoices are also created automatically. And then it is up to the service provider to decide how and at what stage they will process invoices.
Dashboard and additional features
What does the end-user see on the dashboard inside the system? It depends on the amount of data the company would like to make available. “We have customers that do not show anything through dashboards. But in the case of ATOM, we have a more complicated implementation. The end-user primarily views issued invoices. Each invoice is also individually available so it is easy to find out what the price was, and what the service was, etc. And it is possible to download another copy of each pdf file,” reveals Boštjan before adding that a lot more different options are available. In this case, ATOM's system triggers the functionality, and then Space Invoices’ API processes the remaining data.
In this case payment gateway implementation is covered by ATOM. Payments are processed before the invoice in the app. In the case of a refund, it is also up to ATOM to decide if there is a need to issue a credit note invoice. So this is also triggered. Space Invoices are currently working on a solution to make it possible to accept payments via the invoice - if the customer opts not to pay the invoice directly, he later receives a form enabling him to pay online via the invoice.
ATOM uses the Space Invoices system to send documents to their clients. “The sender is our address, but the e-mail address for replies is the one indicated by ATOM. We have multiple templates or PDFs to choose from. They can be edited by color, logo, etc. The whole design experience can be fully customized,” says Boštjan. Space Invoices use Sendgrid for e-mails. Boštjan explains that they have a 99% sender score. Moreover, sending invoices doesn't harm their service. Most of the time, content is simple and definitely not promotional, as it only contains a pdf. Space Invoices do not have any spam reports, because customers never report the invoice as spam.
Country specific solutions
Most countries require invoices although the situation can differ from country to country. In Canada and the US, for example, invoicing requirements are slightly less strict and an invoice is not as important a document as it is in South America and Europe. So sometimes specific statements have to appear on the invoice in order for the recipient to make this document valid. Whenever VAT is applied, it is important that the recipient company can correctly deduce the VAT. Space Invoices also does the customization regarding reporting to governments. “We are still working on those and always are adding additional options. And, in general, we don't have a lot of clients so close collaboration is possible along with an individual approach to solving different challenges,” explains Boštjan.
Talk to ATOM Mobility team to activate online invoicing for your operations: support@atommobility.com