Every company is obliged to keep financial and tax reports. These must be prepared in accordance with legal requirements and submitted to the competent authority within a specified period. In addition to the content, the form and periodicity must be strictly adhered to and changing legislation must be taken into account. If your company has a registered office abroad, the effort is multiplied because the regulations there may differ from the domestic ones and must be observed. In some cases, different data, different deadlines and completely different reports are expected locally. If the tax reports are not submitted in accordance with the regulations or are submitted too late, there is a risk of fines, penalties and sometimes even damage to the company's image. The latter can be damaging to business under certain circumstances. For this reason, entire departments are sometimes involved in tax reporting to ensure that the process is carried out in accordance with regulations.
What is SAP Advanced Compliance Reporting?
To standardize and simplify the process, SAP developed a tool for tax reporting: Advanced Compliance Reporting. It is located in S/4HANA and covers the entire end-to-end reporting process worldwide. Here, all steps necessary for the process are mapped - on one platform. Starting with preparatory steps, the data is recorded in the system. Legal requirements regarding content, form and deadlines can thus be met without the need for additional tools or aids. Required reports such as periodic VAT returns, financial reports, asset reports and many others are stored in the system and can be called up at any time and checked for their content, status, etc. Each responsible person works from a uniform start page in FIORI, adapted to the user group, and has access only to the data released for him.
Advanced Compliance Reporting - Highlights
- Uniform solution for all participating countries
- One screen for all reports
- User-friendly and intuitive FIORI interface
- Traceability of reports
- Monitoring of processes throughout the lifecycle
- Transparency in the entire reporting system
- Analysemöglichkeiten
- Erstellung eigener Berichte möglich
- Digitale Erstellung der Steuerinformationen, Einreichung auf Basis von SAP, pünktlich in Echtzeit in der notwendigen Periodizität: täglich, monatlich, jährlich etc.
- Übermittlung in verschiedenen Formaten (XML, TXT, PDF, XBRL)
Run legal reports - the main function
Key reporting features include:
- Electronic review of reports prior to submission
- Report dashboard
- Audit test
- Workflow for approval
- Report execution options
- Preview function
- Ad hoc reports
Why was ACR developed?
Tax reporting hasn't just existed since yesterday, and somehow the process seems to have worked for most companies - including with the previous SAP solutions for legal reporting. What was the need for a holistic solution?
The globalization of our world brings more and more demands on business processes, and implementation has to be faster and faster. Changing legal requirements, increasingly complex and digitalized processes, new technologies demand more and more data and capacity. Huge amounts of time and resources were needed for an audit file. With SAP ACR, this time is saved because the data is available in real time. In addition to time, resources can also be saved as preparatory manual steps in reporting are automated. Previous reporting tools and manual reports no longer meet the requirements in the digital world. Familiarization with the topic was also difficult because different systems and formats were used. This resulted in data silos. Monitoring and complying with all these requirements takes up a lot of resources. These factors highlighted the need for a centralized and unified platform for all reporting. Handling tax reporting on a unified platform not only simplifies reporting, but also simplifies and correspondingly reduces the cost of technical support for this solution.
Watch our free webinar on 08/04/2022 to see how you can use SAP ACR to create reports that meet regulatory requirements and submit them to the appropriate authorities in the correct format at all times.
*Over 50 participating countries
