Tungsten Network and the art of getting an invoice accepted

An invoice is a request for money dressed as an administrative task. It can carry the wrong purchase order number, arrive in an inconvenient format, or disappear between a supplier’s billing system and a buyer’s accounts payable team. The goods have arrived. The work is done. Now everyone gets to argue about a document.

Tungsten Network built its business in that awkward interval. Its cloud service takes invoice data from suppliers, translates and checks it, and delivers it into buyers’ financial systems. Large suppliers can connect their billing software; smaller businesses can use an online form. The ambition is pleasingly unromantic: fewer people spending their working day asking where an invoice went.

But the revealing part of this company is the work around the software. A buyer cannot transform accounts payable simply by purchasing a platform. Its suppliers must join, submit usable information and change familiar habits. Tungsten makes supplier enrollment part of the service. In a market crowded with promises of automation, that human obligation helps explain both the product’s appeal and its limits.

Schneider could not wait two years

Schneider Electric’s predicament puts flesh on the proposition. When it first approached the network in 2008, it was processing 650,000 invoices across three accounts payable locations. Nine out of ten arrived on paper. Multiple accounting systems and vendor files complicated the job, while an SAP transition was still two years away.

The team considered optical character recognition and imaging. Its conclusion was that scanning would leave the paper process in place, whereas electronic invoicing could remove paper at entry. Tungsten also offered an alternative to building individual electronic data interchange connections. Schneider could improve invoice handling while its larger systems project continued.

“Handling such a huge volume of paper naturally led to errors.”Pam Carper / Schneider Electric

The published case study reports $200,000 in operational savings after six months, with $500,000 in annual savings projected at full deployment. Its reported straight-through processing rate was 85% for e-invoicing. These are customer-specific results, not a tariff or a promise to the next buyer.

Adoption explains the unfinished business. At six months, 38% of suppliers had switched and another 16% were switching. Those figures deserve separate labels. A supplier preparing to join is not yet sending electronic invoices. The lesson for a project sponsor is practical: report live usage separately from invitations, registrations and good intentions.

One connection, several accounting dialects

For high-volume suppliers, Tungsten’s Integrated Solution extracts invoice data from an existing billing system. The network processes, translates, enriches and validates that information before sending it to the buyer. This is where its expertise sits: mapping fields, applying business rules and maintaining connections between organizations that do not share one accounting setup.

The Web Form serves lower-volume senders. They create invoices in a portal rather than commission a system integration. Purchase order conversion can reuse information already supplied by the buyer, reducing repeated entry. Invoice status tools give suppliers a place to check progress, while electronic archiving keeps records available.

The distinction matters. An invoice being delivered does not mean it has been approved or paid. A network can make the document legible and show its status; the buyer still controls its commercial decisions and payment process. Finance teams should define those milestones before treating a dashboard as evidence of faster cash collection.

Industrial distributor RS Components illustrates the integration argument from the supplier side. Its small team handled connections across Europe and Asia. Building a separate electronic invoicing arrangement for every customer would consume scarce technical capacity. Tungsten supplied the mapping between systems, allowing RS to pursue a standard invoicing process across customers with different requirements.

This makes Tungsten a service for both ends of a transaction. Accounts payable teams want usable incoming invoices. Accounts receivable teams want outgoing invoices to reach customers without a fresh technical project for each relationship. The same exchange can serve both, although their incentives and budgets differ.

The rollout is part of the product

The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs Financial Services Center joined Tungsten Network in 2007. Its published account describes an organization looking for capacity and flexibility, including direct integration with vendors’ accounting systems. A web form alone was not the whole assignment.

Supplier outreach then became central to adoption. Before an electronic invoicing mandate, 28% of invoices arrived electronically; afterward, the case study says the share exceeded 75%. It also records 750 suppliers enrolled within six weeks. Those numbers describe a program involving policy, education and implementation, rather than a software installation working by itself.

That is a useful distinction for anyone copying the approach. Give someone responsibility for supplier adoption. Offer routes suited to different invoice volumes. Test the data before opening the floodgates. Measure what reaches the buyer successfully, not just how many portal accounts exist.

Tungsten’s supplier implementation guide makes the testing work explicit: customers have tasks, and test invoices need review. That modest procedural detail is more useful to an implementation manager than an abstract promise of transformation. Someone still has to check whether the purchase order reference lands in the right place.

The public customer material also points to an operational service culture: enrollment, troubleshooting and repeated coordination with finance teams. These are observable features of delivery. For a buyer, the relevant question is whether those responsibilities are included in the engagement and staffed through the rollout.

The bill for sending the bill

Tungsten’s economics include recurring service charges and transaction-based fees. Buyers and suppliers can both pay. That makes sense from the network operator’s perspective, but it creates a second sales problem: the supplier may have joined because a large customer asked it to.

A published Bristol Myers Squibb supplier FAQ describes an integrated option with an annual membership fee and transaction charges beyond an included allowance. It describes a web-form option without a joining fee, with 52 free transactions and paid additional transactions. These are published program terms, not a universal current price list.

More recent renewal documentation says integrated supplier pricing was changed, buyer connection fees were removed and pricing was normalized across countries. It also explains that an account can move to default pricing at renewal. The useful procurement exercise is therefore to compare the applicable initial and renewal terms, transaction volume and connection requirements together.

Implementation carries another cost: internal time. Finance must settle business rules; IT must map and test data; suppliers must participate. Savings claims should be weighed against that combined effort. A cheap subscription with weak adoption can leave an expensive manual process sitting beside it.

The historical business model was already heavily recurring. Tungsten’s fiscal 2020 results described 94% of revenue as repeatable and recurring. That is an attractive property for a software business, and a reminder for customers that this is an ongoing operating relationship.

The bank was the expensive detour

The network’s origins predate its Tungsten name. OB10 was founded in 2000 by Stefan Foryszewski, Chris Lowrie, Alain Falys and John Jermy. The later Tungsten Corporation, founded by Edmund and Danny Truell, agreed to buy OB10 for £99 million in cash and shares in 2013.

The acquisition plan was bigger than document exchange. Combine the invoice network with a bank and analytics, and suppliers could obtain financing against receivables flowing through the system. Knowing that an invoice exists, and understanding its buyer, offered an appealing starting point for a financial services business.

Owning the bank proved costly. In December 2015, Tungsten announced its planned £30 million sale. The company’s stated reasoning was that the fixed costs of operating a regulated deposit-taking institution outweighed the funding benefit. The proposed disposal would reduce annual run-rate costs by £2 million. The sale followed in December 2016.

The financing idea survived through a different structure. A later agreement with Orbian followed another review of the finance operation, and Tungsten’s fiscal 2020 statement reported the new partnership launching in March after two months of technical integration.

The distinction is instructive: distributing a financial service through a network and owning the regulated institution behind it are different businesses. Tungsten’s retreat shows the cost of assuming that an adjacent opportunity should also become an owned operation. The transaction data remained useful even as the corporate arrangement changed.

Kofax bought the network, then borrowed the name

Kofax announced its acquisition of Tungsten in June 2022. The rationale joined supplier onboarding and electronic invoice exchange with Kofax’s capture, workflow and enterprise software connections. That combination could handle organizations at different stages of moving away from paper.

In January 2024, Kofax became Tungsten Automation. The parent’s FAQ makes the relationship clear: Tungsten Network continued as a product offering under the renamed business. The network is now marketed as Tungsten e-Invoice Network. Companies House records also show the former Tungsten Network Limited renamed Tungsten Automation England Limited in January 2024.

That naming trail matters when reading claims about AI, employee numbers or products. The parent’s wider portfolio includes InvoiceAgility, which combines invoice capture and electronic invoicing capabilities. It should not be mistaken for the original network alone. Nor should a parent-company metric be quietly assigned to the London-born business.

The competitive question remains concrete. Basware also offers invoice exchange, format conversion and accounts receivable routing. Translation by itself is not exclusive. Tungsten’s pitch rests on the combination of existing trading relationships, supplier enrollment, compliance work and integration with a broader automation portfolio. A buyer should compare those capabilities against its own suppliers and systems.

The next obstacle is another country’s form

Recent releases show the work continuing at field level. In January 2026, Tungsten added dynamic email delivery of cross-border invoices to off-network buyers for integrated suppliers. June brought Okta as a single sign-on option and further support for French invoice lifecycle messaging. These are practical changes to who can receive an invoice and how users access the service.

Coverage still needs scrutiny. December 2025 release notes said the network would continue compliant accounts payable services in Croatia but would no longer provide compliant services for domestic accounts receivable customers there. A country appearing in a provider’s materials does not settle every transaction scenario.

For a finance team considering the network, the sensible starting point is a map of actual transactions: who sends, who receives, which systems they use and which country-specific services they need. A business sending a handful of simple invoices may have little reason to fund a substantial integration. A multinational with many recurring trading relationships faces a different calculation.

Tungsten’s appeal lies in that accumulated complexity. It offers a way to coordinate the tedious details that turn an invoice into usable financial data. The best outcome is almost invisible: the document arrives, the checks make sense, and nobody has to spend Friday afternoon asking for it again.