THEMES A-Z

E-Government | Services for Businesses |

Business Service Portal

In 2006, the Austrian federal government launched an initiative aimed at reducing administrative costs for businesses, with a target of saving Austrian businesses over EUR 1 billion by 2012. One significant measure taken as part of this endeavor is the Business Service Portal (Unternehmensserviceportal or USP), whose annual savings potential, depending on the stage reached in its development, is between EUR 100 and 300 million.

The aim of the Business Service Portal is to create optimum conditions for entrepreneurs and thus to provide the best possible support for modern, efficient and digital administrative processes. The intention is to strengthen Austria’s position as a business location and to further expand its pioneering role in e-government.

In the course of the implementation of the Business Service Portal, a central online one-stop-shop has been set up, where businesses are not only able to request information relevant to them or to their sector, but are also able to fulfill their information obligations (e.g. notification of an employee’s illness) quickly and efficiently online, securely and at any time of the day or night.

The most important e-government applications, such as FinanzOnline, the electronic data exchange with Austrian social security institutions (abbreviated to ELDA) and e-invoicing to the Austrian federal government (ER>B) have been integrated into the Business Service Portal. More and more services are being integrated on a step-by-step basis.

In addition, a database of forms and a search function for finding the competent authority to deal with in a particular case are available. This means that a single portal can fully and reliably cover all business needs in terms of transactions with the authorities and the provision of information.

Stage 2 of the Business Service Portal is being prepared at the moment, the main focus of which will be the optimization of notification processes and avoiding multiple notifications.

The benefits to businesses are:

24-hour access to a secure and up-to-date service;

all relevant procedures of the federal administration can be seen at a single glance and dealt with in one place; a link between procedures of the federal states and of the local authorities would be technically possible;

single registration to use all necessary e-government applications;

customized information matching the profiles of individual businesses is available at the click of a mouse.

The USP is an initiative of the Austrian federal government. It is operated by the Federal Computing Centre ( Bundesrechenzentrum or BRZ ) on behalf of the Austrian Federal Ministry of Finance.