- SAP Managed Tags:
Business Challenge
Companies have a legal and regulatory obligation to charge taxes on inter-company transactions, regardless of whether the companies involved are under their control or not. However, the current process of handling these transactions can be highly risky and time-consuming. It often requires a significant amount of effort for correction, running, re-running, and rebuilding. Moreover, the existing solution is not scalable enough to handle the growing demand and increasing volume of data. With business relationships becoming more complicated, there is now a greater need for a flexible, scalable, and efficient solution that can meet these requirements. This solution should be able to handle a large volume of data while ensuring accuracy and compliance with legal and regulatory obligations.
Solution Scope
- To enhance the inter-company tax calculation process.
- Allow business users to have complete control over input parameters (from any device).
- Automate the posting of journal entries for each company code for sales/purchase tax.
- Create PDF invoices dynamically that reflect inter-company charges and attach them to the corresponding journal entry.
- Optimize performance to prevent any issues faced in the existing automation.
Solution Architecture
The following image illustrates the ITC architecture diagram of the customer’s productive solution landscape:
An innovative Fiori UI application has been developed to provide business users with comprehensive control over input parameters and automation triggers, enabling them to manage their financial transactions with ease. This application can be conveniently accessed from any device, ensuring that users can perform their tasks without interruption.
Upon initiation of the trigger, the automation program automatically calculates tax amounts from customer line items and subsequently posts journal entries for each company code in the background, minimizing the need for manual intervention. The application is also equipped with the ability to dynamically generate PDF invoices that reflect inter-company charges for each journal entry.
These invoices are attached to their corresponding journal entries, providing users with an efficient means of tracking, and managing their financial transactions. The execution logs are securely stored and can be retrieved for validation and auditing purposes, ensuring that all transactions are recorded accurately and can be audited at any time. The following image illustrates the inter-company flow diagram of the solution design:
Fiori App for ICT Consolidated Inputs
The following are the two Fiori UX applications that were created to facilitate user-driven automation:
Fiori App for Tax Rate Maintenance:
This use-case was able to demonstrate considerable business outcome both on business and financial KPIs as below:
Key Highlights:
- Customer partnered with the SAP MaxAttention team who delivered the prototype in less than 4 weeks and supported the production deployment in less than 8 weeks.
- Transaction Volume – Savings of $1.176 Million Interest and Fines Exposure (annually)
- 40 pairings with over 5K customer line items per execution
- To lower TCO and improve ROI, the solution is developed using SAP Business AI, SAP Build Process Automation, S/4HANA REST APIs, Fiori UI, and SAP HANA Cloud
- The key highlight of the solution was leveraging the Customer’s existing investments in SAP, improving, and optimizing the solution for evolving and challenging business needs with quick time to value.
- The Intercompany Tax Automation project helped customer clear the backlog of vendor invoices and improve their reputation with its vendors.
- Vendors are satisfied with the timely processing of payments.
- Business users are happy with the solution, and the adoption is very high due to the reduction in tedious manual intervention and data processing; end users are now able to focus on strategic tasks rather than mundane data validation activities.
- Customer accelerated the month-end closing process and avoided paying penalties and fines due to tax compliance issues.
Following are the additional SAP MaxAttention customer success stories using SAP Build Process Automation:
- SAP Build Shaping the Future of AI-Driven Enterprise Automation
- SAP Build Embarked Account Payable Digital Worker for a large Oil, Gas & Energy Company
SAP Build Product Management: Steven Jacobson, Andre Borchert
SAP MaxAttention CoE: Kiran Kola, Rohit Dwivedi
