Challenge

Gaz Electricité de Grenoble GEG (www.geg.fr) had the requirement to create and deliver invoices in an electronic format, to allow faster processing of their 5,000 invoices every year.

When adopting digital signatures, Gaz Electricité de Grenoble’s main requirement was to ensure that the solution would allow compliance to the EU legislation. The EU VAT Directive (2006/112/EC) implemented into national law in 2004 establishes a set of rules for the creation and subsequent storage of electronic invoices from both the perspective of the invoice issuer and invoice receiver.

One of the main challenges faced by organizations is to ensure the chosen solution remains valid throughout the 5-year storage requirement. GlobalSign’s digital signatures comes with a fully RFC 3161 compliant timestamping feature which ensures that the digital signature remains fully valid even once the digital certificate has expired. Hence if an invoice query is raised during the archiving period, the time and date of the signature will always be proven via the SEIKO timestamp.

GEG also wanted to ensure that the process would be as transparent as possible for their customers and not require any action on their behalf.

The solution needed to be easy to implement into existing processes so that it could be adopted across the whole organization, without requiring additional training, or incurring installation and support costs.