[Update 10 November 2011. OB10's new CEO, Luke McKeever, reached out to me about this post and I have published his response as a guest post on this blog. We've talked as well and it's clear that he is making huge efforts to improve customer service and support. For example, they now have a support phone number. See Luke's post on his own blog about ways to get support for OB10 if you have any questions or problems with the service.]
[Update 5 May 2010. I have decided to close comments on this post. I wrote the original post nearly two years ago partly out of frustration and partly to comment on usability and blog monitoring in big companies. It has since become a magnet for people's frustration with OB10 and I'm feeling a bit tired of dealing with these comments and the private emails that go with them. This site is about writing and marketing, not moaning. I will, however, publish a response from OB10 if they want to make one but apart from that you'll need to go find somewhere else to complain about it. If you're thinking of inflicting OB10 on your suppliers, there's plenty of evidence in the comments about real users' experiences with it already. If you have to use it, take comfort in knowing that you are not alone.]
One of my clients insists that I use the execrable OB10.com online invoicing system.
It’s almost impossible to use, costs money for each invoice I raise and regularly locks me out for no reason whatsoever.
I am, in fact, the owner of two accounts – neither of which work – simply because I gave up trying to get access to the first one. They didn’t reply to my emails and there is no support phone number.
Now the second one doesn’t work. Here is the ironic and unhelpful error message. I’ve given them over £50 for their “service” and I can’t even log on or raise an invoice.
It’s hard to imagine a more frustrating experience. What makes it worse is that this bloody system stands between me and my hard-earned money. Argghhh.
PS The next day. I was able to raise a support ticket on the second account and get some help to reset the password on the first account. I also got a call from a senior support person in the US who is going to sort out the second account for me. So I hope that my OB10-Kenobi problems have been solved.
Several times when I rant about problems on my blog, people spring out of thin air and solve them. It’s happened too many times to be a coincidence. Do companies have PR firms monitoring blogs? Is it just friendly employees who read the blog? Is there software that does it? I’d be interested to know how companies monitor blogs like mine.
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I can only second all comments about OB10. To my utmost astonishmet my client Pfizer Ltd. has forced us to use this outfit which has caused NO END of problems. No support from them, no telephone number( apart from a very costly AND useless 0870 number), just meaningless automatic email responses. How can these well established companies use such pirates?????
I have started a career selling Invoice Automation solutions – have you had any experience with the other suppliers of e-Invoicing solutions or supplier portals eg the BBC run one, RBS bank offer a service etc – I just wondered if this was true of this emerging industry as a whole or if it was just OB10 being arrogant as they are widely regarded as the industry leaders.
I haven’t had any experience of any other kind of EDI thing. From other comments here, it feels like OB10 is particularly disliked but I don’t know if it has competitors or whether it is worse than them. I’d be interested to hear if anyone else has tried any other system.
All,
I feel I should leave a couple of points here, certainly not defending OB10, but putting this in to context.
Firstly, as someone pointed out earlier, OB10 forcing you to pay £850 per annum or £1 per invoice is because your customer mandates that all their invoices come through OB10 (OB10 are not the only ones There are other hubs/portals with the same business model). Therefore at least part of the problem lies with big customers that believe you should pay for the privilege of sending your invoices to them.
It is interesting that in the traditional EDI model this was not quite the same, you had to generate an EDI invoice and send it via an EDI VAN but how you generated the invoice and how which VAN you used was up to you.
In fact in the UK all the major retailers still use this method. ASDA do not even specify a VAN but rather use AS2 which has no transaction charge.
Before anyone points out that you still have to somehow generate an EDI message I will say that from an earlier comment OB10 is NOT any to any data format and so you may still have to generate a new file format to work with them.
Secondly their software and support appears to be unacceptable but the only way that will change will be when the big customer gets fed up, and I bet they are tied in to multi year deals.
Finally, although to us all, their prices and charges appear extortionate, have some sympathy for them. They have never made a profit yet (last year accounts show they turned over £10 million but lost £6 million), since inception they have lost £39 million. Thank the lord for VC’s I guess. But what this shows if that although their business model does not work for you, it works even less for them.
It’s astonishing that OB10 has burned through so much cash. A few tens of thousands of dollars on improving the user experience and providing better documentation would avoid the vast majority of these complaints. What have they spent their money on?
As a vendor of a client who forces us to use OB10 I agree with all the negative posts. It is a the most aggravating dysfunctional way to try and get an invoice paid.
One could suggest that they have spent it on buying turnover, not anything that matters like software or service, or is that fatuous?
It’s certainly possible. Anyone can earn £10 by giving away £20!
Matthew, in your original post on July 9, 2008, you said:
“PS The next day. I was able to raise a support ticket on the second account and get some help to reset the password on the first account. I also got a call from a senior support person in the US who is going to sort out the second account for me. So I hope that my OB10-Kenobi problems have been solved”
I didn’t see a follow-up to this. So did your OB10 problem ever get solved? Have you had any successful experiences with them? Thanks.
That particular problem got sorted and I have been using OB10 to send invoices to my client. The UI still sucks, for example, I failed to save a line in an invoice and I got an error message that might as well have been in greek for all the use it was. Personally, I think OB10 is specifically designed to make it DIFFICULT for suppliers to bill their clients.
In my role as an IT contractor I have been asked to make the output from a client’s QuickBooks invoice program work with OB10. The people at OB10 have sent me a load of spreadsheets telling me what hey need, but no help on how to produce any of the information. Is there anyone out there using Quickbooks and OB10?
Tom,
The issue will probably be around the format of invoice you can produce. The first question to ask is what is the number of invoices per annum, if it is under 25 per annum then the Web Form then, even though the interface is not good, may be the better answer. If you still want to use an interface then contact me and I will try to help more.
I know that it is late in this thread, but as a company that enables Global Open Commerce document transfer, we at Loren Data ECGridOS.com hope that the walled garden approach of these types of systems will start being more open and responsive to the mid market and small players.
Keep people out of your netwrok, and bucking standards is a strong arm way to grow a business. Is it sustainable,? we cab only hope that the vision of OB10 someday matches their execution.
.-= Alan Wilensky´s last blog ..EDI Beat Poetry =-.
OB10 is sooo bad. How does one explain…
OB10 has so many internal problems with accurately mapping and submitting invoices. OB10 has never made any profit for their investors even though they charge exorbitant amounts of money for the privilege to send an invoice to the buyer. OB10 has a high turnover in staff. OB10 is not responsive to problems when there is a problem on our invoice to our client. OB10′s web form really sucks!
With so much negative karma in their company, why won’t they just GO AWAY!
It still surprises me that there are so few good alternatives to OB10. It feels like it is a service that could work well for suppliers and their clients as well as the company that connected them. Any suggestions? Matthew
I know of other more “friendly’ e-invoicing companies, Tradeshift comes to mind, they seem like good folks, we hope to have them as ECGridOS developers.
It seems to me that when a B2B enabler is an On demand model, if they try and create a walled garden, a closed hub, they are not protecting themselves they are hurting customer choice. We have seen decent competitive VANs that offer great tools for small threatened by other ecommerce carriers and networks?
This is not the way to run a business. At our company, on the network side, we connect everyone without questions, competitors and all. Yet, we are subject to some bad acts and surcharges by the larger VANS. We still accept interconnects from all. We have been doing this since 2001 on ECGrid.
On the tools side, we dont ask what your model is. You want to build the next e-invoicing empire to beat the VANs (including us) here is ECGridOS API to connect EDI messages anywhere. Why?
We know that when you see how economical our API Controlled EDI Network is, you will use for more and more services, and you users will never need to know FTP, EDI, AS2 again. If you are a platform host, cloud B2B, they probably do not need to know what an 850 is, either. But with our API, they certainly do not need to know how to interconnect to other trading partners, VANs, or run AS2 in house. It just works. Hear our EDI rap song! on our website! Its all about the end users, that’s why we only service the hosts and services providers!
.-= Alan Wilensky´s last blog ..We Ease the Pain of EDI Communications in Multitenant Platforms =-.
OB10 has the worst business model of any provider across the globe. They have an agressive and overpriced model where they use bullying tactics to force people to use their ‘so called’ service. There are so many alternatives out there. Many solutions if you want to do it yourself (much less expensive) and many more if you want to use a service provider that doesn’t enforce ‘memberships’.
I think we should start a Facebook group called ‘ Don’t join the OB10 Network’ and show them who’s boss!
The problem is that the large companies do not fully appreciate the negative implications on their smaller supply chain partners who are forced to pay for a technology that does not fit them at all. These type of operators create more complexities and costs for the whole ecosystem that should try to address the SMEs needs as well. We should send a message to large corporates to stop this madness.
It’s true although OB10′s lack of support has caused several of the people I do business with to waste a great deal of their own time. Eventually, I think this kind of pressure must build up within companies. That said, big company purchasing departments are often a law unto themselves. I sometimes think that their main job is to PREVENT purchasing not to faciliatate it.
It’s true although OB10′s lack of support has caused several of the people I do business with to waste a great deal of their own time. Eventually, I think this kind of pressure must build up within companies. That said, big company purchasing departments are often a law unto themselves. I sometimes think that their main job is to PREVENT purchasing not to faciliatate it.
Well we can have some fun while agreeing that the SME needs an easier less costly services entry to trade everywhere, and that new SAAS providers should have the tools to provide exactly that.
here is rap video that I made about the EDI and Invoicing business:
http://animoto.com/play/oqqJ2xixtBklTrAtzt62jQ
.-= Alan Wilensky´s last blog ..We Ease the Pain of EDI Communications in Multitenant Platforms =-.
We use P2d and GXS and these seem far more user friendly (and quite a bit cheaper too) but unfortunately one of our new customers (quite a large one) insists we invoice via OB10 – have just set up but haven’t yet tried it
Everything BAD you’ve said about OB10 is UNDERSTATED!!! After two weeks invested in finding the information required to establish my “Quick, 5 minute” OB10 account, I finally succeed. The subsequent email tells me I can’t use it for a couple of days, but it CLEARLY states I can submit invoices immediately. (I try, try, try with weird errors until I finally give up and wait 2 days.) Finally my account goes active, and I am asked to fill in tons of information I don’t have. Fine. Hours later I struggle through my first invoice only to find I find I can only submit attachments in TIFF format. I DON’T USE tiff format. After two hours research, downloading, trying, uninstalling, etc., I finally find a free PDF to TIFF converter that works (www.convertdocs.com) only to find it converted my 8 page PDF file into 8 TIFF documents! OB10 only allows 1 attachment per invoice. Another two hours of research and I’m concluding there is no free software to convert mutilple TIFF pages into 1 TIFF.
If I could have 15 minutes alone with whoever is running that blasted OB10 system …..
Wow, Stacy, that sounds like a nightmare. You’re not alone but that doesn’t make it easier, does it. There is some comfort though in the fact that a Google search for OB10 shows this post as the number two entry, making it very clear what real users think of the ‘service’. Matthew
Thanks for letting me rant! It still makes my blood boil to think about it!! I finally submitted the invoice with the incomplete attachment. But I expect similar battles over subsequent invoices. (by the way I got the name of the Tiff converter website wrong – it’s “cometdocs.com.” But my husband’s Mac will convert a PDF into one TIFF file, so I’ll be using him as my converter in the future.)
Thanks again for the rant space!! It made me feel a little better.
I just made pdfs of about 40 invoices, one at a time, because our customer that insisted that we use ob10 has not made the purchase orders available on ob10. Evidently they have been having issues getting POs loaded for about a month, and they finally agreed to accept the invoices by email. I raised a support ticket in March, which they marked “resolved” a couple days later. It wasn’t. I reopened it, they marked it “closed” without having resolved it. Today I raised a new ticket, we’ll see what happens. In the meantime, our customer’s payment performance has plummeted. Pre-ob10 they were excellent. Now…abysmal.
It does make me wonder whether one of the unspoken “benefits” of OB10 to its customers is a cash flow boost as they take longer to process invoices and lose a few along the way to tech support problems.
I understand why you are so upset for using OB10, but let me tell you, as a worker in Sofia (Bulgaria) office, you shouldn’t attack the common worker of this company, but, instead, its big bosses that live very close to the most of you, in London.
Just for your information, when you call us and complain with hundreds of support tickets everyday, you should be aware that the most of the employees work in Bulgaria and Malaysia.
In Bulgaria they pay 400€, which even for bulgarian reality and at this level, is low..I can tell you that to rent an apartment costs no less than 300€, so you see..
They worked with OPI for several years: http://www.opiglobal.com/
OPI is an indian company that has a very bad name around here..they used to treat us as modern slaves. OB10 said that it couldn’t do anything but now that they broke the contract and found another outsourcing company, it’s the same. so we now know the bullshit was OB10, not OPI.
We know the system is ridiculous, we work with it everyday..what we would like would be you to attack the management of these companies and not employees that receive this misery..there are other companies in this business, for instance Basware:
http://www.basware.com/Pages/default.aspx and what you should say to your clients is precisely that.
These guys seem to be base in Scandinavia. I don’t think they pay this misery..the question is: are you and your clients available to pay a little bit more to have a quality service and be sure that at least no one is being exploited?..or do you prefer to complain but in fact you are happy with this?..
and yes, we have people checking blogs and social networks, of course, they are in London and their titles are customes services specialists and others..they are “specialists”..in London, good wages, and all they do is to assign us in Bulgaria and Malaysia, work as if we were stupid people and to be in facebook and searching for blogs..
Blogs are a very powerful tool these days and we really hope that people from developped countries help to change this exploitation..
for your information, if you are Integrated Solution customer you pay an annual fee of 1300€. besides, all clients pay 1€ for each invoice sent and believe me that OB10 processes hundreds of millions of invoices each month..yes, hundreds of millions..
so, please, don’t attack the weakeast side, people that has to survive with 400€ a month, half (200€) in Malaysia, attack the powerful ones.
Thanks.
OB10 is the worst piece of garbage I have ever tried to use. I have used many electronic invocing systems but have never found a more useless piece of trash than OB10. Their presentation to their clients must be full of lies becasue I cannot see anyone wanting to put their suppliers through such a wasteful excercise of trying to post invoices.
OB10 acknowledges that the world is changing in respect of communications. Blog posts, Twitter and social networking sites are playing an increasing role in the way that corporations communicate with their audience and also how employees choose to communicate with their employers or indeed customers their suppliers.
We respect this change and embrace this communication revolution, but unfortunately in this brave new world, people can post assertions, information or opinion in complete anonymity and without regard for the accuracy of the content, which remains out there on the web, possibly forever.
We do not normally respond to blog posts, but in the case of the post from Veselin, we need to. This post is full of factual inaccuracies and suggests exploitation, something that OB10 does not and would never condone.
Indeed it is OB10’s policy to pay reasonable and competitive wages to our employees and our salary scales and benefits are above the norm in the territories mentioned; this way we attract the best people, and they stay with us. Staff turnover is not an issue in OB10.
Employee satisfaction remains a high priority in all of our offices around the world, and we are very proud to have the extremely high employee retention rate as a result.
I can not comment on the authors’ authenticity of this post, but wanted to clarify a number of key facts which are significantly incorrect and misleading.
Stefan Foryszewski
OB10
Stefan,
I’m grateful that you have taken the time to comment here. I can’t comment on the factual accuracy or provenance of the comment you mention but I welcome your contribution as much as anyone else’s.
I’m sure readers and commenters alike would love to hear your plans for improving the OB10 service and especially customer support. Feel free to comment here.
As you say, there’s a communications revolution going on and customer feedback (even those customers are frustrated and angry) can be a very powerful tool for business improvement.
Matthew
Glaxo have just decided to put all suppliers onto OB10 – what a nightmare – I have been trying to set it up to send my first invoice for days on and off and keep getting error messages that do not mean anything.
The website is basic, messages useless, they must lie to their new customers when they sell their services because no big company would want to be involved with this if they knew how bad it is.
Stefan Foryszewski – I have to say that I believe Veselin much more than yourself – what a load of rubbish – I do SO hope ob10 goes down the pan!
OB10 service level and support is really very terrible. FTP server to receive invoices is not reliable (sometimes unavailable and OB10 unable to diagnose the problem or even recognize that it exists). A pushy and incompetent technical contact was my introduction to the company and in the subsequent 6 months I have experienced examples of unacceptable incompetency time and time again.
It is truly a wonderful business model they have, because the company that requires us to use their service is not the one paying for it or the one subjected to their severe inadequacies.
It might be time for a ground up organized supplier action to find an alternative to OB10, or to find a way to get the data into OB10 without using OB10. They do accept VAN connections, but that means you need to fund a method to get low volume input into the system with the OB10 Front end.
We can facilitate the communications, a volunteer provider can clone the OB10 interface to act identically to the native interface, and the return data can be sent in a variety of ways.
If people are interested in this alternative, email me. If OB10 is monitoring this thread – well, there is obviously a grass roots problem here, as other e-invoice hubs do not have the same troubles.
I can understand the desirability of an OB10 like system, and we work with several e-invoicing hubs. Maybe the upstream trading partners are unaware of the problems, or are isolated from the complaints.
It sounds like an opportunity for a competitor with “juice” to go to the upstream partners and point out the deficits, or for OB10 to take these complaints to heart. I can think of no other business models where the true end users of a system could be so dissatisfied without corrective action being taken,
Its not rocket science, its vendor management!
Absolutely agree with all the negative feedback about Ob10.
This cutomer service is terrible, and the interface is useless!
I ceratinly do hope that the Ob10 managment are reading this blog.
I have submitted multiple helpdesk tickets regarding a range of issues I have had with invoicing…. I usually get a one sentence response (usually about 24 hours after the initial query was posted) and the response on nearly every occassion does not answer the question I asked. This means I have to send a follow up email – wait another 24 hours – and on, and on and on….. until, usually, I figure out the solution myself. This has happened on atleast 3 seperate occassions.
I don’t understnad why there is no Telphone Customer services number with a bunch of technicians on hand to help us sort out our queries efficiently.
And they say Electronic Invoicing was supposed to make things more efficient… I for one ask… efficient for who ? Not for us suppliers sending Invoices !!! I wasted a half day a few weeks ago trying to send two invoices.
If Ob10 are reading this…..Sort yourselves out!
Following up on my April 16 post…they again marked the ticket “resolved” with a message saying they had escalated the issue to our customer, and to give it 48-72 hours for completion. I re-opened the ticket, and asked respectfully that the ticket remain “open” until it was truly resolved. As of this morning, I am still waiting for resolution.
As a former employee of OPI which “rented” me to ob10 I can confirm that Veselin’s description is 100% accurate.
I hate OB-10 or OB 1 Canobee a pain in the butt! This takes so much time and time is money. First off having to pay for this service is ridiculous. Here is a rude awakening, our price for our product just went up in price to compensate for all of this, which inturn will overflow to the consumer. I have to create the invoice in my system and then again in OB-10 and rarely does it go through the first time. I almost always never get paid on time and have to raise a ticket, and it does not report that it was rejected. I must call my customer to see if the invoice is in their system and they hate it too. More time wasted. They just don’t get it time is money!
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