A month without tax news is yet to come and the digitalization journey of governments continues, resulting in more and more authorities pushing new e-invoicing regulations that are quickly becoming the new norm. 7 out of the 10 largest economies in the world either have introduced or plan to introduce mandatory electronic invoices for all business transactions that take place in the country. And this is just set to increase if we consider VAT in the Digital Age (ViDA) announced by the European Union: this upcoming new regulation will go beyond single countries. It will introduce a new digital reporting system based on e-invoicing across all member states.

In response to these rapidly increasing requirements, SAP offers SAP Document and Reporting Compliance: this is SAP’s strategic solution that helps you to fulfil local compliance regulations, from electronic documents to statutory reporting, ensuring consistency and facilitating reconciliation. The solution also enables enterprises to automate compliance processes and achieve efficiencies via standardized compliance operations which are continuously kept up-to-date with new and evolving legal mandates by SAP.

Since last year, the ready-to-use scenarios have been expanded to cover 497 legal requirements (81 new scenarios since the 2022 release of SAP S/4HANA) across 57 countries, including newly released electronic invoices for Poland, Romania, Slovakia, and Egypt. The full list of ready-to-use compliance scenarios currently available can be found here:

• SAP S/4HANA Cloud, public edition
• SAP S/4HANA Cloud, private edition and SAP S/4HANA.

Beyond compliance, SAP Document and Reporting Compliance has also been expanded with new capabilities to further automate business processes and simplify the integration with local platforms worldwide.

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Electronic document consistency checker

With the introduction of mandatory electronic invoices, you can no longer send an invoice to your customers without the intermediation of authorities. As a result, authorities quickly become gatekeepers of all transactions happening in the country and start to make use of the data collected in real-time to audit you automatically or even prepare draft returns on your behalf.

To minimize the risk of noncompliance, you can leverage the new electronic document consistency checker that helps you to verify the consistency between your system of record and national platforms. You no longer need to trade-off effort / risks and rely on spot checks. SAP Document and Reporting Compliance can now verify the consistency of all your transactions instantly. And, after your predefined consistency checks have run automatically, you can easily review inconsistencies, analyze what the actual root cause might be and take the required actions before the end of the period.

Fig. 1: New Fiori application ‘Check Electronic Document Consistency’ (F6680) to centrally review the inconsistencies automatically found and initiate the required corrections.

Automation of error notifications during electronic documents processing

As more and more countries mandate electronic invoices and the volume of transactions you need to manage increases, SAP recognizes there are opportunities to further streamline and accelerate the corrections. In addition to the Manage electronic documents app that allows you to monitor electronic documents worldwide, failures are now integrated with the notification center of SAP S/4HANA: you are promptly notified with the failures that require your attention without having to proactively check the latest status on a regular basis.

Based on the error messages returned by the authorities, you can push automated notifications to the expert users that are in charge of solving the issues. These users are notified with a badge in their notification center and, from the notification itself, with one click, they can navigate to the actual documents to review the details and take the required actions.

Fig. 2: Automated notification prompting the electronic documents that have failed and require actions.

One centralized channel for all the integrations with authorities and other platforms

In the past, SAP has offered multiple cloud services for the electronic exchange of invoices and statutory reports. And, yes, this is now a thing of the past. SAP has modularized the architecture of SAP Document and Reporting Compliance, cloud edition that now serves as a central channel for integrations with authorities and other platforms.

You can now set up one integration between SAP S/4HANA Cloud and the cloud service and, after maintaining your credentials, the cloud edition intelligently integrates with the different local platforms for which SAP maintains the connection on your behalf. And, you can extend to additional business processes beyond SAP S/4HANA Cloud, including integrations with SAP Business Network, Concur solutions and, soon SAP Human Experience Management for payroll submissions. All scenarios supported can be found here.

Fig. 3: One centralized channel for all submissions to authorities.

While these are the key highlights for the 2023 release, you can use our What’s New available on SAP Help to see all innovations released with SAP Document and Reporting Compliance and global tax management. You will find many more improvements, features and new scenarios that can help you to fulfil regulations and automate your compliance processes worldwide.

A big testament of this commitment is represented by the Silver Stevie Award that SAP won for the second year in a row during the 20th Annual International Business Awards.

To engage further on this topic, you can visit our SAP Document and Reporting Compliance community or join us in our many customer events such as the SAP for Global Trade and Tax Conference, presented by TAC Insights on 7th – 8th November 2023 in Madrid (Spain).

To Learn More

For more detailed insights on SAP Document and Reporting Compliance and Global Tax Management, see:

SAP made it again! SAP Document and Reporting Compliance wins Silver Stevie® Award 2023 for Compliance Solution

SAP Document and Reporting Compliance: Cloud or On-Premise? Not an “either or” option, but a streamlined solution for electronic compliance!

SAP S/4HANA 2022 – SAP S/4HANA Update for 2022 – Further automate e-invoicing and statutory reporting with SAP Document and Reporting Compliance

SAP S/4HANA 2021 – E-invoicing and statutory reporting made easy with SAP Document and Reporting Compliance, a holistic approach to compliance reporting regulations

Integrate SAP Document and Reporting Compliance with SAP Billing and Revenue Innovation Management to automate compliance for your recurring billing

Upcoming regulations – Announcement of Legal Changes (instructions in SAP note 2382863)

Future innovations planned with SAP Document and Reporting Compliance