Business2Government - Integration options for tax-relevant processes in the cloud

More and more countries want to use electronic data exchange of receipts to prevent money laundering or moonlighting, while at the same time digitizing their tax processes.

No sooner have the first GDPR projects in companies been completed than the next IT tasks are already on the horizon due to legal requirements. What seems to make sense from a macroeconomic perspective in the context of Business2Government (B2G) processes is presenting more and more companies with Herculean tasks.

Incoming and outgoing invoices in Spain, invoices in Hungary, goods movements in Brazil and numbering of invoices in Argentina and Mexico - even for smaller branches or sales organizations of companies abroad, globally active companies have to build up appropriate know-how or buy it in externally.

In each country, regionally active IT companies offer corresponding services with a connection to common ERP systems. With a corresponding number of branches in various countries, this can lead to a high administrative and financial effort in terms of support and upgrades.

SAP offers a more charming option with its eDocument Framework. This allows companies to map local requirements with a high degree of standardization and flexibility.

This product is now available for an increasing number of countries, primarily in South America and for the European region, including a corresponding solution for Hungary (eDocument Framework Hungary Online Invoice Registration) to meet the legal requirements as of July 1, 2018.

The same components are used for all countries: uniform transactions, for example for converting SAP documents into the regional data format, a monitoring application, in addition to the AIF integration architecture and message mapping and routing on the SAP Cloud Platform Integration Services as a middleware solution in the cloud.

These country-specific adjustments are delivered via SAP Notes, which enables a partial update with as little impact as possible on existing processes and functionalities.

Those who shy away from the effort or risk of implementing individual solutions for each individual country in their globally used ERP system can also switch to an S/4 Hana cloud second-tier architecture.

Second tier here does not mean a dual system landscape of test and production system, but rather the use of a central ERP system and one or more S/4 Hana Cloud Tennants.

The localizations released by the manufacturer ensure that all legal requirements are met by the ERP system and, thanks to the software-as-a-service approach, are also always kept up to date - and this without any manual effort on the part of the customer.

Such a scenario is particularly interesting due to the integration scenarios for a central ERP system already delivered in the standard. These range from an integration of logistics, sales, procurement or financial processes to an FI consolidation.

Like the processes in an S/4 public cloud system, these out-of-the-box interfaces are characterized by a high degree of standardization and can be implemented in a very short time.

This means that the effort involved can easily compete with the implementation of a single localization in a central ERP system.

Regardless of whether integrating these B2G processes into a central on-premise or private cloud ERP is the option, or whether a second-tier architecture with an S/4 cloud implementation is the way to go, both offer companies a viable and financially attractive option for the future.

Future-proof, because when legal requirements change, either updates are made available or these are implemented directly in the system by SAP. Financially interesting because both solutions offer fast, calculable solutions in terms of licensing, operating and implementation costs.