Join Sovos at the SAPinsider Europe Super Summit in Vienna!
We’re proud to be Gold Sponsors of From Migration to Modernization: Supercharging Your Business Transformation.
Whether you’re planning your move to SAP S/4HANA or optimizing an existing deployment, this summit will help you go beyond migration to drive true enterprise transformation. Discover actionable insights on data governance, cybersecurity, cloud scalability, intelligent automation, and more—all grounded in real-world expertise.
To review the full agenda for this event, click here.
Meeting Venue
Hilton Vienna Park | Am Stadtpark 1, 1030 Vienna, Austria
We recently partnered with StudioID on a global survey of 150 finance leaders to reveal significant insights into how companies are navigating the increasingly complex world of indirect tax compliance. The research, which included CFOs, EVPs/SVPs/VPs of Finance, and Finance Directors from companies with revenues ranging from $500 million to over $5 billion, provides a comprehensive look at the strategies finance leaders are implementing to stay ahead of changing regulations.
Real-Time Reporting Becomes Essential
The survey found that an overwhelming 95% of finance executives believe ensuring accurate real-time data reporting is important or extremely important for improving tax and compliance operations. This shift reflects a fundamental change in how tax authorities operate globally.
Previously in indirect tax, the way that the government could enforce the law was always through periodic reporting, but it was an unsophisticated instrument. Now, continuous transaction controls have become very popular since it’s about sending data in real time to the government.
This transition means businesses are no longer simply reporting their subjective view of a period’s aggregate sales and purchasing numbers —tax authorities are increasingly gathering authenticated data in real-time and informing companies of their liability instead. The stakes are higher than ever, with non-compliance potentially halting business operations entirely rather than just resulting in penalties.
Navigating Complex Jurisdictions
The complexity of global tax compliance is staggering. Approximately 30% of both US-based and international companies surveyed sell products and services across 2,000 to 5,000 different tax jurisdictions. Each jurisdiction has its own rules, rates, and reporting requirements. Requirements are also increasingly dynamic, with laws and technical specifications evolving to reflect tax administrations’ fine-tuning operations at an ever-increasing rate.
With initiatives like VAT in the Digital Age (ViDA) and e-invoicing mandates rolling out across Europe and beyond, companies must stay ahead of regulatory changes. Encouragingly, 87% of finance executives report having systems and processes in place to anticipate these upcoming mandates.
Top Challenges in Implementation
When it comes to successfully implementing current and upcoming e-invoicing mandates, finance leaders identified two primary challenges:
Staying informed about domestic and international compliance requirements (38%)
Choosing the right platform that can seamlessly integrate with existing systems (49%)
Additionally, 56% of respondents mention difficulty in making business decisions due to limitations around tax and compliance data accessibility and accuracy.
Strategic Responses to Tax Complexity
Finance leaders are implementing several key strategies to improve their indirect tax and compliance operations:
Training existing teams on tax technology (56%)
Developing and maintaining tax technologists (51%)
Hiring specialized talent (34%)
Investing in fully automated solutions (61%)
These investments are paying off—76% of finance executives report seeing a positive return on investment from their tax compliance software. However, cost remains a significant concern, with 91% identifying “lowering or maintaining compliance costs” as a top priority.
The Problem of Point Solutions
One notable finding is that 73% of respondents believe their companies use too many point systems to meet tax obligations across different geographical locations. The median number of systems currently in use is 40, with most wanting to reduce this number significantly.
There seems to be a lot of confusion in the market, whereby a lot of businesses think they need to replace their business software with regulatory-driven software. This simply isn’t true as there are multiple ways that leaders can make existing business software compliant.
Looking Ahead
As tax authorities worldwide continue advancing their technology, making compliance more complex and demanding, finance leaders must balance compliance requirements with business objectives. The most successful approach integrates tax considerations into core business processes rather than treating them as separate functions.
The message is clear: while tax compliance is becoming more complex, the right strategies and technologies can transform this challenge into an opportunity for greater efficiency and intelligence about your business. Whatever you set as your business objectives, make sure that your compliance software works in such a way that the tax is never a burden.
By staying ahead of regulatory changes and investing in the right solutions, finance leaders can ensure their organizations not only remain compliant but thrive in an increasingly complex global tax landscape.
Want to learn more about how finance leaders are adapting to the changing indirect tax landscape? Download the full research report, “The Future of Indirect Tax: How Finance Leaders Are Staying Ahead of Changing Regulations” for comprehensive insights and strategic recommendations. Download Now
We are thrilled to announce that Sovos will be Diamond Sponsors at the 7th Annual VAT Management Summit in London. The event brings together leading experts and professionals to discuss the latest trends, regulatory updates, and best practices in VAT compliance, indirect tax management and the global digital transformation of tax.
Both Christiaan van der Valk, General Manager, Indirect Taxtech and Ryan Ostilly, VP Product Management at Sovos, feature on the packed agenda.
To review the full list of this year’s topics and speakers, download a brochure, and register for the event, click here.
Meeting Venue
Congress Centre – 28 Great Russell St, London WC1B 3LS, United Kingdom
As indirect taxes (sales tax, VAT, GST) continue to play an increasingly vital role in global economies, tax authorities are modernizing their processes to improve efficiency and oversight. This evolving landscape presents businesses with both new opportunities and complex challenges when it comes to maintaining compliance.
Join Sovos expert Christiaan Van der Valk as he highlights five key trends in Indirect Tax Digitization, offering valuable insights into how businesses can adapt to the shifting regulatory environment. You will also learn strategies for staying compliant and ahead of the curve in this rapidly changing space.
We will cover:
The shifting landscape of indirect tax and its growing significance.
The five key trends business leaders must take into consideration when developing their tax and compliance strategy
How to develop a long-term plan and stay ahead
We hope to see you there!
In today’s digital world, every department across a business seeks money and resources to enable or expand digitization projects. The tax team must build a solid justification that demonstrates the value that will be returned to the business that also aligns with interconnected projects, such as ERP upgrades and government-mandated digitization initiatives.
Join us on 27 May for valuable takeaways you can put directly into practice in your organization.
Join Sovos at Factuurcongres®, where digital transformation and EU regulations take centre stage. Discover the latest trends, connect with peers and explore smart solutions to optimise your financial processes.
Don’t miss this chance to future-proof your financial strategy.
Postillion Convention Centre Utrecht, Bunnik, Netherlands
Tax authority audits can happen at any time. Join us for this webinar where our compliance experts will explain how to minimize the risk of audit, the evolving landscape of reporting and common triggers for an IPT audit.
You’ll explore how businesses can navigate the evolving compliance landscape without getting trapped between disparate e-invoicing, reporting, and determination vendors.
Join us for an in-depth webinar designed to help event organisers navigate the complexities of VAT compliance for international events. Discover essential steps for handling cross-border VAT, understand Place of Supply rules for physical and virtual events (including the new 2025 updates) and learn how to avoid common VAT risks.
For many U.S.-based companies, the first step in global expansion is selling into Canada, especially for eCommerce sellers and marketplaces.
However, to ensure a smooth and compliant expansion, it’s crucial to understand Canada’s unique “sales tax” system. This is a must-attend webinar for anyone doing business in Canada, or planning to expand operations to the Canadian territories.
In the first blog in our series, we introduced SAP Clean Core concept and how much is being made about its impact on business, specifically the ability to customize an ERP to meet operational needs.
In part two, we addressed how businesses can use the SAP Clean Core principles to create a system that better supports their business objectives and positively impacts their tax and compliance management.
For our third installment in this series, I’d like to spend time talking about your business’ path to Clean Core and what that means for your tax and compliance programs and initiatives.
As outlined in our first two posts, aligning with Clean Core holds a number of significant advantages for companies including making them more nimble, efficient and cost efficient. It is a move I would encourage any business using SAP to consider sooner than later.
Readying for the Project
With any large-scale update, migration or platform change, getting your business ready for Clean Core is a process that takes advanced planning, a sound strategy and buy in from the highest levels of the organization to execute effectively.
In assessing your business’ readiness to adapt to Clean Core, it is important to understand both the short and long-term goals of the project and outline the specific actions that you will need to take to get there. My recommendation is to determine what your ultimate goal is, and then work backwards from there. This will help to ensure that no important steps are missed in the planning process.
With a project of this size and scope, it’s also critical to detail which parts of the project will be assigned to which departments and determine a method of oversight to ensure that all areas of the business are making progress and on track to meet associated deadlines.
When you are dealing with large, multi-faceted organizations, it is not uncommon for departments to move at different paces. This is where having executive buy-in becomes critical as it ensures that the project remains an organizational priority.
Outlining your Change Management Strategy
No two organizations are exactly the same in terms of their makeup and infrastructure. Therefore, you will need to conduct a self-assessment of where you are before you can determine which transformation trajectory makes the most sense for your business.
It is important to realize that an ERP transformation journey is a commitment that will require change. Assessing your organization’s appetite for change and the pace at which these changes can be implemented are critical success factors.
For organizations with the ability and desire to move faster, they will accelerate their time to modernization and be in a position to reap the benefits more quickly. However, I will caution that moving faster than your organization can realistically support can have serious consequences as well, which makes your initial assessment such an important part of your transformation journey.
The Impact on Tax and Compliance
Embracing the tenets of Clean Core can ensure that critical Tax and Compliance functions and decisions are no longer driven by complex and often difficult to maintain customizations within core ERP functions. Moving to an infrastructure with reduced complexity will enable your organization to more easily integrate specific tax solutions that are automated and maintained by third parties. This is an issue of great importance as governments and tax authorities around the world embark on their own technology journey and implement systems that are far more complex than previous generations.
Many countries have moved towards the complete digitization of tax compliance which requires real-time transactional data and complete transparency into your end-to-end transaction processes. Meeting these requirements can be the determining factor in your ability to conduct business within certain regions. Aligning with Clean Core is an important step in enabling your technology to react to changing regulatory conditions faster and more efficiently.
Concluding Thoughts
This type of transformation project should always be supported by and aligned with a solid business strategy. Having a set criterion of what you are trying to achieve and how you will measure effectiveness should be established up front. And global tax compliance should be a foundational element of any transformation event.
Tax and compliance are a great place to start your journey to begin unlocking the full power of aligning Clean Core principles with best-in-class tax solutions.
In the first blog in our series, we introduced SAP Clean Core concept and how much is being made about its impact on business, specifically the ability to customize an ERP to meet operational needs.
For part two, I’d like to address how businesses can use the SAP Clean Core principles to create a system that better supports their business objectives and positively impacts their tax and compliance management.
Why Clean Core is Becoming a Business Priority
In an article in Forbes last year entitled, SAP: Why Modern Software Needs A ‘Clean Core,’ the author makes the argument, correctly so in my opinion, that the old way of adding functionality by customizing the core has often become overly complex, cumbersome and costly. He explains how a new model was developed that decouples two components: one focused on predictability and the other on exploration. This evolution model is known as ‘bimodal IT.’
Now, bimodal IT is not a new term. According to TechTarget it was coined by Gartnerback in 2014 and was the subject of a Gartner report in April of 2015 entitled, “How to Achieve Enterprise Agility with a Bimodal Capability,” by analysts Simon Mingay and Mary Mesaglio.
So, why the history lesson on the subject matter? I think it’s important to establish the fact that over-customization of technology platforms is not a new concern. It has been around for a while, but what has changed is the environment surrounding it.
Today, digital economies are moving at a pace where traditional methods and countermeasures are no longer effective. Today’s environments demand more structure, standardization and flexibility so that they can react fast when called upon.
Why Agility is Essential
Over the last decade, we have seen an explosion across core areas of the technology sector that makes agility critical. Whether it is preparing for cyberattacks, or the ability to quickly analyze data to take advantage of business opportunities, agility is an essential tool in your arsenal and old methods simply aren’t cutting it.
Today’s digital economies are demanding the rapid adoption of new technologies. A crucial step in keeping up with these changes is to adopt agile business-critical connected technologies that aligns with the principles of SAP Clean Core.
Adopting a global compliance solution that aligns with Clean Core principles will become critical to ensure you can keep up with the pace of digitization as it continues to evolve.
Clean Core’s Impact on Tax and Compliance
There is perhaps no other business segment that has felt the impact of technology on a global scale more than the area of tax and compliance. Heavy investment by government tax authorities over the past decade has completely changed the process of collecting and remitting tax obligations.
In an effort to close or eliminate tax gaps, gone or soon to be gone are the days of collecting and analyzing tax data and remitting after the fact. Today, it’s all about real-time analysis across the complete spectrum of the transaction. This requires the use of automated tax platforms that can quickly adapt to changing regulatory environments, ensuring compliance across every transaction.
Through applying the principals of Clean Core businesses can now attach dedicated and highly functional compliance platforms into their technology stacks without the need to customize their core SAP environment. This eliminates the need for long testing cycles, customization and many of the manual process updates that would otherwise be required.
Coming Next
Stay tuned for the next part in this series, where we will dive deeper into how Clean Core impacts specific tax processes. Upcoming segments will cover:
Part IV: Clean Core benefits and business performance
Part V: Eliminating Tax’ dependency on IT
Much is being made about the introduction of SAP’s ‘Clean Core’ concept and how it will impact a business’ ability to customize its ERP to meet the unique needs of its operation. In this first blog in a series taking on the issue of Clean Core, I’d like to focus on the realities of what it is, why it’s important and the reasoning behind it.
What is SAP Clean Core?
SAP defines ‘Clean Core’ as a method of integrating and extending systems in a way that is cloud-compliant, while ensuring governance over master data and business process. In simpler terms, the move to SAP Clean Core helps protect the integrity of the SAP platform by limiting the extent of customization. And for good reason.
As a software vendor, you can’t lose control of your own code because you’re allowing so much customization and additional code to be added by your customers and or their consultants. These customizations are often intended for very specific use cases that may impact only a small number of customers. A ‘Clean Core’ architecture protects the SAP platform and its customers by limiting these excessive customizations.
The Problem with Over-Customization
When a platform becomes overly customized, SAP, the platform owner, must deploy a tremendous amount of development and support resources to ensure that they are accounting for all the changes and capturing feedback from the field.
This generally requires the platform owner to be in a perpetual state of developing hot fix code patches to repair ‘breaks’ in the system brought on by over customization. While customers would only be required to implement the code patches there were relevant to them, SAP was still on the hook for developing thousands of these patches. The cost and resources of doing so were growing exponentially, and needed to be reined in.
Benefits of Clean Core for SAP Customers
As anyone who has worked in or with IT for any period of time can attest to, the most complicated environments are ones where there is a great deal of customization. Early on in Information Technology, it was the Wild West, where based on the knowledge and experience of your architect, is how your businesses network would be constructed.
Then, thankfully, platforms and standards entered the discussion and businesses were able to construct environments that enabled them to operationalize new capabilities quickly, while simultaneously lowering costs and driving down dependencies within IT departments. The position SAP is taking here, and one that I agree with, is that clean core will be the next stage in making your environment more productive and efficient.
Implications of SAP Clean Core on Taxes
One of the most significant implications of Clean Core is in tax compliance. Clean Core opens up new possibilities for businesses to employ personalized tax technology outside of their traditional SAP environments. Rather than trying to build complex coding to tackle increasingly complex tax rules within their ERPs, they can integrate dedicated tax engines that are automated and seamlessly update to changing regulatory environments.
SAP Clean Core offers businesses the opportunity to simplify their IT environments, reduce customization, and improve system stability. The implications of Clean Core on taxes are especially promising, as businesses can now leverage specialized tax technology that integrates smoothly with their SAP systems, ensuring compliance without added complexity.
Coming Next
Stay tuned for the next part in this series, where we will dive deeper into how Clean Core impacts specific tax processes. Upcoming segments will cover:
Part IV: Clean Core benefits and business performance
Part V: Eliminating Tax’ dependency on IT
Sovos invites you to meet the team in London and hear Ryan Ostilly, our VP, Product Management share strategies for harnessing tax compliance measures as a force for growth within your organisation.
Sovos are delighted to support this year’s event as Platinum sponsors. Meet the team and learn more about our Indirect Tax Suite and how it can benefit your business.
The EU Directive for VAT has laid the groundwork for a harmonised VAT system throughout the different Member States. However, the implementation of the EU VAT law within the national jurisdictions still creates a disparity between its application and conditions to be met, specifically regarding some of the intra-EU simplifications to be applicable.
In less than six months, Poland is going to introduce its long-awaited CTC clearance e-invoicing mandate – a tax reform that will impact a large amount of businesses.
It has been possible to issue and receive e-invoices voluntarily via Krajowy System E-Faktur (KSeF) since January 2022, but from 1 July 2024 it will become mandatory for suppliers and buyers that are in scope of mandatory e-invoicing to do this via KSeF.
A detailed understanding of the new regime, plus timely and proper preparation, is critical for compliance. Whilst there is a six-month grace period on financial penalties, non-compliance can negatively impact your business in many other, often unexpected, ways.
In this 45-minute deep-dive webinar, Marta Sowińska from our Regulatory Analysis and Design team will cover:
Introduction to the mandatory e-invoicing reform in Poland
Scope of the clearance mandate: domestic vs. cross-border transactions
Key challenges:
B2B vs. B2C transactions
Latest updates on QR codes
Emergency models – also known as offline modes
Key dates and implications of non-compliance
Join us on 8 February at 2pm GMT | 3pm CET for a thorough review of the Polish KSeF e-invoicing mandate and the opportunity to submit your questions.
As tax authorities continue to digitize processes in their mission to reduce fraud and close their VAT gaps, they are introducing requirements that provide greater visibility into a company’s financial operations in the form of Continuous Transaction Controls (CTC).
It would be a mistake to think that being prepared to meet obligations in one of the countries where you operate can simply be replicated in another – CTCs are far from a ‘one-size-fits-all’ solution.
Join us on 24 January 2024 in our latest quarterly VAT Snapshot webinar series where regulatory experts Dilara Inal and Marta Sowinska will examine how tax authorities in Poland, Romania, Israel, Greece and Spain – all simultaneously implementing CTC regimes – are doing so with different sets of requirements.
Don’t miss this opportunity to learn more about these unique regimes and what they mean for your business.
