Automation in Romania starts from a fact no company can avoid: invoices to other companies must go through the electronic system.
Once you have done that, you already have half the infrastructure. The rest of the flow — order, delivery, payment, reporting — becomes far cheaper to connect.
Where it starts
Electronic invoicing. It is not optional and it is not solved with a PDF. The system has to generate the invoice in the required format and submit it. A company doing that by hand for every invoice is paying someone to copy data.
Reporting. Once the data is structured for invoicing, it is structured for reporting. The hard work is done once.
The link to the accounting package. SAGA, WinMentor, SmartBill, Oblio. Each has its own interfaces; the choice determines how simple the integration is, and changing package mid-project is the most expensive decision available.
Archiving. Electronic documents have retention periods, and a system that generates them has to keep them accessible. It is the part nobody thinks about until the first inspection.
What gets automated after that
The full order flow. From the site or from the client, through stock, invoicing and delivery, with no manual entry at any point.
Documents to clients. Invoice, delivery note, confirmation — generated, sent, archived.
Periodic reports. The same figures, the same hour, the same format, without anyone opening three files on Monday morning.
Internal notifications. Unpaid order, stock below threshold, a document missing from a file. The system flags it on the day it happens.
A portal for B2B clients. Orders, history, documents, balance. It removes the calls and messages that occupy people full time.
What automation does not solve
A badly defined process is not fixed by automating it — it becomes faster and just as wrong. If two people in the company calculate stock differently, the system will record both methods and produce two answers.
That is why the first step is agreeing how the process should work, and only then building. It is the boring part, and skipping it is the most common reason automation does not deliver what it promised.
Questions
Are we required to invoice electronically?
For business-to-business, yes. What your system concretely has to do depends on volume and on the accounting package in use.
Can you connect the shop to SmartBill or SAGA?
Yes. They are different integrations from 1C, with their own documentation, but the same category of work.
What does an automation project cost?
It is calculated from the time saved. A process consuming ten hours a month that can be automated in two days pays back within months; one consuming an hour a month does not.
What stays ours?
The code, the data and the accesses. The systems run on standard technologies, so someone else can take them over. The details are here.