How Maison Kayser found e-invoicing’s sweet spot

By Job Eloja

Behind the picture-perfect facades of cafés, restaurants and bakeries lies a flurry of activity. After all, aside from making delectable dishes and serving them to customers, food and beverage (F&B) establishments have to deal with everything from procuring quality ingredients to ensuring that suppliers are paid on time. As important as these activities are, they also entail piles of administrative paperwork—taking valuable time away from F&B owners and staff.  

Because of this, many F&B establishments—including artisanal French bakery Maison Kayser—are turning to high-tech methods to make their back-office operations more efficient. One such way is the Infocomm Media Development Authority’s (IMDA) E-invoicing initative—the e-invoicing network also known as InvoiceNow that has more than 25,000 busineses on the network. By leveraging on InvoiceNow, it allows businesses to send invoices in a structured digital format even across different finance systems. 

To encourage more businesses to adopt e-invoicing, IMDA with the support of the three local banks DBS, OCBC, UOB along with Association of Banks in Singapore (ABS) have worked to simplify the end to end process of e-invoicing to e-payment through bank supported platforms to help reduce transaction friction and support local businesses in their digital capability uplift. By registering for both services, businesses can easily use PayNow to pay for the e-invoices they receive. In this feature, we take a look at Maison Kayser’s journey from romantic Paris to sunny Singapore and find out how they adopted e-invoicing along the way. 

Early to rise

From authentic French baguettes to buttery financiers, Maison Kayser is a veritable wonderland for anyone with a sweet tooth. The bakery was founded in 1996 by Mr Eric Kayser, who comes from a long line of bakers. When he opened his first shop in Paris’ historic Rue Monge district, Mr Kayser hoped to promote artisanal methods in baking bread—specifically the use of natural leaven, a fermented mixture of water, flour, sugar and microscopic yeasts present in the air.  

At Maison Kayser, natural leaven forms the essence of the many breads and pastries freshly baked daily. In fact, the original natural leaven culture is regularly exported from Rue Monge to other Maison Kayser shops around the world, including its outlets in Singapore. “Our artisan bakers start baking in-house early in the morning, using natural leaven and a long fermentation process to come up with the best quality day after day,” shared Mr Julien Troch, general manager of the bakery. 

In December 2011, Maison Kayser finally arrived on the shores of Singapore, located at the basement floor of Scotts Square Mall in Orchard Road. Since then, they’ve opened five more shops in Singapore as well as over 100 outlets scattered across 24 countries and six continents.

A fresh start with e-invoicing

With Maison Kayser’s popularity, the bakery sends and receives over 100 invoices per month to around 65 suppliers and customers. About 80 percent of these invoices are paper-based, making processing a cumbersome task. All these hardcopy supplier invoices, after all, have to be received and subsequently filed in folders. 

By adopting InvoiceNow, Maison Kayser hopes to get rid of the many inefficiencies associated with manual invoicing. E-invoicing now allows the company to send invoices straight into their accounting software. As more and more companies join the Peppol e-delivery network, the ease of processing e-invoices via InvoiceNow also increases.

Maison Kayser’s e-invoicing service provider of choice is eInvoice.sg, which ties in nicely with their accounting firm’s software. Even better, the platform charges zero fees for sending and receiving up to 100 documents, allowing the company to further save on accounting costs. With this system in place, Maison Kayser can fully focus on what they do best—crafting authentic French baked goods for hungry foodies in Singapore.