Malvern Panalytical automates sales tax compliance with Sovos

Case Study

Malvern Panalytical

Malvern Panalytical (a Spectris Plc company), a leading manufacturer of laboratory analytical instruments, eases financial tax burden with Sovos.

Summary

Business Challenges

  • Malvern Panalytical was finalizing a merger and needed to centralize all tax compliance under one ERP system. One company was using Sovos and the other was using another provider for their sales tax needs.

  • Exemption certificates were being stored inconsistently creating room for error. This would be problematic in the case of an audit.

  • Some tax status updates had to be completed by the UK Finance team, which led to inefficiencies and delays due to time zone differences.

  • Malvern Panalytical needed a tax solution that would enable global users to access and maintain customers’ sales tax records in real time.

Solution

Malvern Panalytical automated its sales tax compliance by moving to the cloud with the Sovos end-to-end sales tax suite, including Sovos Global Tax Determination, Sovos CertManager and Sovos Filing. This allowed all global business to be consolidated into a single sales tax provider. Specifically, Malvern Panalytical found the following benefits:

  • Monthly finance reconciliations are easier to manage, thanks to reporting capabilities in the Sovos solution.

  • Process improvement has led to increased responsiveness to customers. Malvern can now update tax status and re-invoice within minutes, versus hours or days.

  • Service cases can now be raised and managed online.

Benefits

  • Reduced burden on the finance team, freeing them up from processes that previously took up hours of their week.

  • Malvern now has the ability to raise and manage service cases online, gaining transparency and visibility.

  • Malvern found peace of mind with Sovos CertManager as the single source of truth – all information readily accessible, stored in a centralized place.

“CertManager has provided the functionality that we needed to enable our Sales Order Processing team to manage the data themselves, regardless of their time zone or location.”

Richard Beetlestone

Financial Controller UK/AMEC, Malvern Panalytical

The Company

Malvern Panalytical is a manufacturer and supplier of laboratory analytical instruments, dual-headquartered in Malvern, United Kingdom and Almelo, The Netherlands. Its diverse customer base includes companies in the food and drink, metals, minerals, pharmaceutical and academia industries.

The Challenge

Malvern Panalytical needed to choose a single tax solution following a merger. Routine updates between the original solution and SAP took one to two hours. This was inefficient and no updates could take place when the Finance team had logged off for the day.

“[Sovos Filing gives us] greater access to data for Finance in order to see monthly transactions and returns online, and reconcile against SAP for anomalies.”

Richard Beetlestone

Financial Controller UK/AMEC, Malvern Panalytical

Why Sovos?

Malvern Panalytical used Sovos products for years, so when it needed to onboard a new company due to a merger, it looked to Sovos. A demonstration helped determine Malvern had found the right solution. Now Malvern’s Finance team’s resources can be better distributed and the Sales Order Processing team is empowered to own and manage sales tax data.