A common challenge faced by organisations striving for zero touch or accurate straight through AP invoice processing is the appropriate and correct handling of indirect taxes such as VAT.

Within SAP, and even with the use of the SAP Invoice Management solution by OpenText, this challenge persists and can more often than not mean costly manual intervention and the associated risk of introducing errors. Processing in SAP requires a tax code; this requires the need for translating any external tax rates on an incoming AP invoice to an appropriate and accurate Tax code to allow entry and posting. The population of the correct tax code can often require judgement and manual AP processing, particularly where a tax rate can mean ambiguity for the purposes of tax code determination. A classic example being there is a 0% rate or where no VAT rate is quoted; these can typically be attributed to numerous different SAP tax codes, such as is the case for zero rated supplies that need to be reported separately for EU reporting. Excelerated Sourcing have addressed this challenge through an extension to the core Invoice Management product. The Tax code determination Excelerator allows automatic allocation of SAP tax codes without need for manual intervention, also providing associated checking to allow accurate straight through processing with the correct tax information before the posting and payment of an invoice in AP.

A number of features and benefits of the Excelerator are highlighted:

• Invoices will have tax code determined automatically at the moment the invoice enters SAP
• Tax code determination table with inbuilt rules, providing flexibility for customer to achieve accurate tax coding in line with their business and to meet with VAT compliance
• Tax code determination table maintenance vastly streamlined compared to standard VIM offering and is geared toward the commonality of VAT requirements throughout the EU.Provides additional automatic workflow using SAP Invoice Management to cater for VAT related exceptions
• Caters for EU VAT reporting requirements such as the reverse charge principle on imports, distinction for EU VAT services vs goods, VAT registration number checking
• Ability to deal with line level tax rates to cater for mixed rate invoices as well as handling where tax rates not visible/provided
• Ability to handle other ‘text context’ based tax determination, for example identifying appropriate non-reclaim tax code for entertaining
• Compliments Standard and best practice SAP VAT and EU Reporting requirements, ensuring EU Reporting compliance and Intrastat reconciliation for all EU Reporting countries
• The Excelerator can easily be deployed in existing SAP Invoice Management environments.
• Speedier, accurate tax processing benefits the customer in a number of ways including VAT compliance and promoting accurate capture of VAT inputs for improved cash flow through VAT recovery.