Author: World Finance

Managing tax across Europe has become increasingly complex: with new VAT regulations, migrating to the cloud, multiple financial systems, faster data speeds, and urgent reporting deadlines.

For companies with cross-border supply chains, ensuring consistent VAT treatment across all legs of transaction requires tedious manipulation of data in the ERP system. The process is manual, error-prone, and usually requires significant support from IT.

Errors in the interpretation of which data is relevant for VAT determination can mean errors in VAT payments and accruals which affect the bottom line.

Vertex offers a visualisation tool to streamline chain flow data mapping for improved VAT determination. Using the chain flow accelerator, the user can map data inside SAP ECC or SAP S/4HANA to Vertex VAT fields – and perform an interpretation of the data before it’s sent to the Vertex tax engine for VAT determination.

To perform this data mapping, Vertex offers a unique visualisation tool to streamline the data mapping and improve accuracy. Tax professionals can use the tool without IT intervention, connecting up to 80 data elements and documents in a chain, to ensure consistent VAT treatment across the transaction.

The streamlined chain flow data mapping is not only available in S/4HANA, but also in ECC. SAP customers who implement the tool now in ECC can streamline their migration to S/4HANA, since the VAT data mapping can be easily transferred.

Add the Vertex Chain Flow Accelerator to SAP ECC or SAP S/4HANA today – to improve VAT accuracy and spend less time recouping VAT overpayments, reduce IT support, increase tax department efficiency, and improve audit performance.

Today’s tax departments continually look for ways to streamline their operations and reduce audit risk. That focus is not just on the sales side of the business, but on the procurement side as well.

Regardless of whether you’re using your ERP system or implementing a new procurement platform, managing tax in the procure-to-pay process requires constant collaboration between tax, IT, procurement, and accounts payable teams. Without this partnership, it will significantly increase audit risk and inefficiencies within AP.

The manual process of tax research and updating financial systems can strain in-house tax and IT resources, and lead to tax errors. Even when these systems are updated with the latest tax content, their native tax functionality is usually not granular enough for today’s complex tax landscape.

At the same time, tax coding decisions on purchase orders and supplier invoices are being made in the AP department instead of the tax department; and all this is happening at a time when tax authorities are increasing audit activity.

Integrating a tax engine automates sales, use, and value-added tax determination to improve the accuracy of taxes paid and accrued. It uses rules-based calculations instead of human decisions. It applies the same tax logic across the procure-to-pay process: at the requisition and purchase order stage, and at the invoice reconciliation and approval stage.

Adding a tax engine for your procurement process brings benefits across tax, IT, and purchasing. It reduces the burden and cost of continuous in-house tax research, since tax content is maintained by the tax engine provider. There’s less IT support needed to implement tax changes, since this can be managed by the tax specialists themselves. It improves tax accuracy since the functionality is more robust than native ERP or procurement systems.

You can introduce consistent tax coding for reliable, repeatable accounts payable process, where tax own tax decisions. And you can integrate a single tax engine to all your financial systems across sales and purchasing, for centralisation and scalability.

Add a tax engine to your procurement process today to improve tax accuracy, reduce IT support, increase efficiency, increase scalability, and improve audit performance.

“When you’re processing 20-25,000 tax returns and 146 audits a year, it’s extremely important to have a partner like Vertex that you can rely on,” says Sandra Blair, Head of Indirect Tax for Siemens in the US.

Sandra Blair: I’m head of indirect tax for Siemens in the US. We are a global conglomerate in the top 50 throughout the world. We have locations in every country in the world.

We were seeking a new tax calculation engine provider. In conjunction with the Vertex consultants, the DMA alliance partner, we were able to move seven SAP systems off of our previous provider, onto the new Vertex tax calculation engine. Move 3.5 million tax exemption certificates, and set up our use-tax accrual program in less than six months.

After a bit of stabilisation, we then moved our Oracle system in three weeks from our previous provider, onto the Vertex solution.

One of the big benefits that we have been able to obtain from Vertex is putting our destiny in our control. We are no longer having to reach out to IT to make changes once a configuration is identified, or an overpayment, or an over-accrual on the use tax, we’re immediately able to go into Vertex, test our solution, correct it, and get it rolled into production. So a five to six month process has now been taken down to a day, if needed. So it’s been a huge benefit, cost reduction, savings.

We have also had a report customised, so any of these changes that we have made because of Vertex, we were able to identify down to the penny how much we’ve been able to save. So it’s setting us up to take us into the future, into the digitalisation environment and economy. And Vertex, with their content, has given us a broader range to handle our conglomerate and all the service lines that we sell.

When you’re processing 20-25,000 tax returns a year, and 146 audits a year, it’s extremely important to have a partner through, like Vertex, that you can rely on. Their tax calculations, you know they’re right. That provides the right answer when it comes back in to your system.

Working with Vertex has enabled my shared service organisation to take on additional work without additional headcount. It has allowed us to increase our accuracy on our consumers use-tax filing, our accuracy on our customer billings, which has led to helping us increase our customer satisfaction scores from a tax department perspective: making sure that everything is compliant, and that we’re responding in the most efficient and effective manner.

Tax and IT departments today face an uphill battle, with constantly evolving tax rules and business changes. A Vertex tax engine provides a powerful solution to automate, streamline, and centralise indirect tax, so companies can reduce risk and increase scalability.

Vertex takes tax determination out of each individual transaction system, and puts it in a single global tax engine to support the sales and purchasing side of your business. No matter how many financial systems you use.

With Vertex, indirect tax is managed in one place – but leveraged across all of your business units around the world.
A Vertex tax engine delivers robust capabilities for the end-to-end tax process.

Continually updated tax content, maintained by the Vertex research team, supports sales, use, and value-added tax; plus industry-specific content for retail, leasing, food and beverage, and communications services.

Configurable tax rules let you configure your system to support your specific products and complex business needs.

Real-time address cleansing and precise jurisdiction assignment improve tax accuracy, regardless of where the transaction takes place.

Robust integrations seamlessly pass transaction details and tax calculations between Vertex and your financial systems in real-time.

Integrated tools to help you collect, track, and store exemption certificates. Reporting and data to automate compliance and support audit management. And options to let you deploy the tax engine in whatever way meets your business and IT requirements: in the cloud, on premise, or a hybrid approach that combines the benefits of both.

Find out how a Vertex tax engine can help you: reduce audit exposure, improve compliance, improve global scalability, centralise tax management, and increase productivity.

Integrate Vertex with your financial systems today, to make your end-to-end tax processes more efficient, agile, and scalable. Contact Vertex today to learn more or schedule a demonstration.

All tax departments collect data. But are you using it in an intelligent and insightful way?

Tax has access to one of the largest, most detailed datasets in the company: sales, purchases, expenses, payroll, and more. But many use that goldmine of information merely to support the monthly compliance process. You use data to generate and validate the monthly returns.

A truly value-driven tax function uses that data for more than just compliance. It leverages data intelligence tools to not only improve the accuracy of the returns, but unlock time, capacity, and insight, to become a more strategic tax function and drive better business outcomes.

You’ll reduce the time spent on compliance and focus more on higher value functions: like audit defence and planning to support the business.

Data Intelligence leverages every data point that already exists in various business systems, and turns it into insight for the tax function to enhance business outcomes.

Data Intelligence tools gives you insight about your customers, your vendors, your taxes collected and paid. Your newly released products and services. Your new selling and buying locations.

You can easily identify changes and trends; and pinpoint areas of risk that you can address more proactively, to impact the business sooner.

Data Intelligence turns raw data into insight; insight you can use immediately, to not only optimise tax performance, but to model, predict, and influence business decision-making to drive business growth.

It’s the key to moving your tax department out in front of the business, and becoming a profit centre; rather than just a cost centre that handles regulatory reporting.

With Data Intelligence, you’ll use tax data to identify new business opportunities, and influence business growth strategy beyond the tax department. You’ll become more proactive, not just reactive. You’ll measure the value contributed, not just the tasks executed.

A manual spreadsheet approach to VAT reporting is labour-intensive, error-prone, and costly. Keeping up with the latest regulatory changes is challenging at best; and the effort required to support business expansion can hinder a company’s agility to respond to market opportunity.

Vertex offers a cloud-based VAT-reporting solution to reduce risk, automate and improve process efficiency, improve data quality, and keep the business in line with the latest regulatory changes.

Import tax data from multiple ERPs, a tax determination engine, and all other financial systems – even Excel files.
Perform data quality checks and make necessary enhancements.

Map data easily to generate signature-ready, multi-language VAT/GST returns, reports, and AP/AR ledgers. E-file right in the application.

Access workflow tools, dashboards and reports, designed to let tax preparers and managers alike track progress across the end-to-end compliance process: from filing preparation, to approvals, to submissions.

And support audits with drill-down capability to detail transaction data and complete audit logs.

Vertex Cloud VAT Compliance enables multinational corporations to support business growth without additional VAT/GST process burden.

Built-in up-to-date tax content ensures you keep pace with the latest return forms and regulatory changes.
And efficient cloud access reduces the need for IT infrastructure and maintenance, accelerates deployment, and scales easily to support business growth.

Leverage a robust, multi-country VAT-reporting solution across the enterprise: ideal for decentralised tax departments and shared service centres.

Add Vertex Cloud VAT Compliance to your tax operations today, to: streamline process efficiency and reduce manual error, enhance data accuracy and transparency, improve audit performance, and accelerate scalability.