How Tickstar is helping Spark, NZ’s largest telecommunications and digital services company, adopt eInvoicing

As one of the largest publicly-listed companies, Spark New Zealand’s supplier and customer base – ranging from consumers to small-to-medium businesses, government agencies and large enterprises – is vast. 

Given the scale of the organisation’s invoicing processes, it’s perhaps no surprise that Spark was one of the first movers in the eInvoicing space in New Zealand. Although eInvoicing isn’t yet mandated in New Zealand, Spark responded positively to early encouragement via the government’s eInvoicing Adoption Leaders Group, run by the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment (MBIE).

“We were keen to embed eInvoicing in our processes and it’s good for us as a big business to show [to the wider business community] that it is important,” shares Amy Bennetts, Technology Transformation Lead at Spark.

Through this group, Spark established a relationship with Tickstar, which was invited to respond to Spark’s open tender and subsequently chosen to become the organisation’s eInvoicing provider.

“Tickstar understands eInvoicing very well, which was a big win for us,”
Amy Bennetts, Technology Transformation Lead at Spark.

“They were also working with the government, and it seemed like a good idea to be working with someone who knew what the government was planning and working on.” 

As part of a broader upgrade to Spark’s enterprise technology systems, Tickstar worked with the team to build an eInvoicing channel on top of this technology that automates the end-to-end workflow of invoices from Spark’s suppliers through to their Accounts Payable. The next phase is the creation of a similar workflow for Spark’s customer billing process (Accounts Receivable).

Throughout the process, Tickstar’s team has been on hand to offer support and technical resources to assist the transition.

“Tickstar were really good throughout the whole process, especially when the tech team had questions, they were quickly answered,”
Kimberley Macfarlane, Product Owner at Spark.

“We have meetings twice a week with Perry [Tickstar’s Business Development Lead – APAC], which has made [the transition] a lot easier,” Amy adds. “[With other software vendors] we have sometimes made assumptions, which turn out to be wrong and cost us a bit of time. Having Perry there as a dedicated resource meant we weren’t making any assumptions or wasting time.”

While Spark’s eInvoicing adoption journey is still underway, Amy and Kimberley say they’re already seeing the benefits of a more efficient, secure invoicing process.

“It’s been a learning curve, which is good because we know what questions to ask moving forward. The biggest benefit for us on the Accounts Payable side is that the invoices are almost instantaneously there,” Kimberley says.

“A lot of customers have a lot of different systems for receiving invoices,” Amy adds. “Obviously that’s time-consuming for us to load invoices into all these different systems, and not ideal in terms of data breaches and privacy. One of the advantages of eInvoicing for us on the Accounts Receivable side is it gives us a standardised format to work with.

“[eInvoicing] is the way forward because it makes it easier for everyone to exchange information. It allows businesses to streamline the way they work internally and with each other. That’s going to save us all a lot of time.”

To learn more about how Tickstar from Xero can support your organisation’s eInvoicing adoption journey, contact our team today.