Automating billback in Easy Market

+1M hotels

+200 countries

+18K activities

The starting point

Easy Market is an Italian online travel agency (OTA) that has been working with Voxel for more than 7 years now. In 2015, they decided to digitize the receipt of invoices using Bavel eBilling as they were not able to manually process more than 50,000 invoices.

Years later in 2019, Easy Market began working with Booking.com and a new requirement was generated: recover the invoices for services they hired at hotels of the online travel agency (OTA). The problem Easy Market had is called billback. In the travel sector, billback is the inability to obtain an invoice that meets the legal requirements of each country and which allows recuperating or compensating the VAT. Easy Market works with more than 100 hotels from Booking.com and, every month, more than 1,000 invoices had to be manually requested.

At this point, Easy Market decided to seek help from their trusted technology partner, Voxel, to find a solution to the billback problem.

In the travel sector, billback is the inability to obtain an invoice that meets the legal requirements of each country and which allows recuperating or compensating the VAT.

BBR by Voxel uses state-of-the-art technology to enable hotels to issue an electronic invoice.

The solution

In order to automate the billback, Easy Market decided to implement Billback Request (BBR) by Voxel. BBR by Voxel uses state-of-the-art technology to enable hotels to issue an electronic invoice with the applicable tax information and breakdown without needing to invest time or resources.

The implementation of BBR in Easy Market was accomplished in phases. The process was first implemented with a group of selected hotels and the rest of suppliers from the Booking.com platform were gradually added.

Thanks to BBR by Voxel, Easy Market was able to begin automatically receiving invoices from all the services provided by hotels from the OTA without errors, charge the VAT and obtain a valid tax document to justify its cash flow.

The outcome

Thanks to the solutions provided by Voxel, Easy Market has significantly reduced manual tasks, discrepancies and errors in their administrative department.

Currently, Easy Market automatically receives more than 68,000 invoices through the Bavel platform each year. This is a 40% increase in transactions compared to 2015 without needing to augment the management team. The Italian OTA has also been able to receive electronic invoices from more than 750 hotels from Booking.com without needing to manually request or process them.

Also, and thanks to Bavel’s digital file, the Easy Market team can also quickly retrieve any invoice, even using Booking.com’s booking number.

“Another benefit is that we have completely eliminated the use of paper, with the respective positive impact this has on the environment”, explains Alessia Capriotti, Accounts Payable Coordinator at Easy Market.

Another benefit is that we have completely eliminated the use of paper, with the respective positive impact this has on the environment.

ALESSIA CAPRIOTTI,
Accounts Payable Coordinator a Easy Market.