Electronic Billings Expected to Grow.

According to a recent Visa Canada study, with more than 4,000 purchasing professionals still using traditional purchasing methods, electronic technology usage is expected to increase dramatically in every aspect of the corporate purchasing process over the next five years. The national study, entitled "How Business Buys," shows that, collectively, electronic technologies are expected to account for 27% of all corporate billing transactions in Canada by 2005. Currently, only 2% of corporate billing is done electronically.

By 2005, the use of e-commerce-based ordering and billing processes in corporate purchasing will more than quadruple to account for 18% and 27% respectively of all corporate ordering and billing transactions. At the same time, the use of Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) billing is expected to triple to include 39% of organizations compared to 13% today.

The findings show that while the move to electronics is gaining momentum among purchasing professionals, paper continues to rule as the primary purchase transaction medium. Currently, cheques account for 85% of the payments for goods and services bought by corporations today. Payments by cheque will decline to 64% of total corporate payments by 2005 as electronics take hold. Electronic Funds Transfer (EFT) will be one of the prime displacers of cheques as its use grows to account for 23% of all corporate payment transactions by 2005, almost five times higher than the level of EFT use today.