Electronic invoice at Valamar Riviera: before and after

60+ years
of experience

Adriatic
coast

Leisure
tourism

The starting point

With 37 hotels and resorts and 15 camping resorts, Valamar Riviera is the leading travel company in Croatia. After more than 60 years in operation, in 2019 the corporate team identified a series of inefficiencies in their invoicing process.

Firstly, it was a manually intensive process (printing, placing in envelopes, mailing…) and costly, both in terms of time and money. Secondly, invoices occasionally failed to reach their destination which led to delayed payments. Consequently, the company was faced with a number of unresolved invoices at the end of the tourist season.

Valamar also used to manually draft periodic reports that included the invoices that were sent and the payments received, which made the whole process prone to errors. The need to subsequently correct errors often resulted in delays in the entire invoicing and payment collection process.

Finally, one of the company’s more important corporate customers asked to receive their invoices in electronic format.

At this time, the hospitality company began searching for a technology partner to implement electronic invoicing in all their hotels.

Invoices failed to reach their destination which led to delayed payments.

“Business processes are simpler now.

Vlastimir Ivančić
IT and Customer Service Director

The solution

Valamar decided to partner with Voxel to implement electronic invoicing for its corporate customers in Europe.

The deployment of Bavel Billing, Voxel’s electronic invoicing solution, was carried out in two phases: it was first implemented in a pilot hotel. And subsequently, after the pandemic, it was implemented in the rest of the Croatian company’s establishments.

The integration between the Bavel platform and the Valamar management system was optimum and smooth, primarily thanks to a close collaboration between the teams of both companies.

The outcome

After one year with Bavel Billing in full operation, Valamar has issued 5700 electronic invoices. In other words, 20% of its B2B invoices.
Throughout the year 2022, the hotel company has connected with its main corporate customers to exchange electronic invoices: TUI, Der Touristik, OTS, Jet2Holidays… And, even though the billing process is fully digitalized, Valamar continues to work together with Voxel to connect with more corporate customers, especially in Europe.

“One of the main benefits of using Bavel Billing is the digitalization and automation of processes”, explains Vlastimir Ivančić, IT and Customer Service Director. In fact, the invoicing process that used to be done manually, is now 100% automated. This means that the people in charge of managing invoices have saved 20% of their time, which they can now spend on tasks that provide greater value to the business.

Another more important benefit for the Valamar team is the improvement achieved in their invoice collection process. Thanks to the electronic invoice, 100% of the invoices are collected at the end of the year compared to the 35% that was collected before implementing this technology.

Finally, the Valamar team also highlighted the fact that periodic reports are now automatically generated and there is a single platform where all the invoices can be reviewed. “Business processes are simpler now”, says Ivančić.