Tradeshift Bridges Chinese Economy with Digital Global Trade Network, Launches First-Ever Cross-Border E-Invoicing Solution

SAN FRANCISCO — Nov 3, 2021

Tradeshift, a market leader in e-invoicing and accounts payable automation, is offering first-of-its-kind e-invoicing capabilities to global companies with a footprint in China. Tradeshift Pay now helps enable companies doing business in China to send and receive electronic purchase orders and invoices with cross-border trade partners, linking one of the world’s largest economies to the rest of the world across the Tradeshift Network.

For the past year, the Chinese government has pushed for e-invoicing among domestic trade to ease its reliance on paper, increase efficiency and reduce costs – which Tradeshift has facilitated on a compliant China-hosted platform through a partnership with Baiwang, a Chinese government-approved tax services partner. Tradeshift has successfully bridged its China-hosted platform with the Tradeshift Network creating a seamless Pay experience for companies conducting trade in and out of China.

This solution helps overcome the regulatory hurdles that have been a barrier to digitalizing the  more than $530 billion in global trade activity that passes through the country each month and made it difficult for Chinese companies to access existing foreign e-invoicing solutions, forcing their global partners to operate a separate China-only system or rely on paper.

Tradeshift Pay enables a seamless shift from paper to digital accounts payables and creates the foundation for 100% digital transactions. Buyers and sellers are connected across the Tradeshift network driving collaboration, transparency through access to common transaction and historical data, as well as economic efficiency.

“We’ve been working with Tradeshift and its local partner Baiwang since August 2018 to support our domestic invoice verification in China, said Jie Shen, Supervisor for Accounts Payable at Schaeffler Greater China. “To date over 670,000 domestic fapiao have been scanned to Tradeshift for processing. By automating the workflows associated with VAT input verifications we have reduced the error rate from 7.4% down to zero. Eliminating the need for manual correction has saved us significant time and resources on tax verification and reconciliation.

“We see similar potential for the cross-zone e-invoicing solution. As these capabilities are still new, the number of foreign suppliers sending invoices in this way remains relatively small, but we expect to see growing efficiencies as more overseas suppliers are integrated onto Tradeshift.”