Top Global Tax Management Requirements

Meeting the Needs of Your Tax Management Team

As the rate of change in technology accelerates, so does the rate of change for businesses. There is a seemingly endless array of third-party solutions for SAP users to consider. But the reality is that most organizations only have the time, funding, and capacity to implement the most valuable solutions. Each team in an organization must prioritize the solutions that can help maximize their value contribution to the company.

In the previous blog, we discussed how digital transformation and modernization of tax and finance are the top drivers of global tax management strategies. Now, we will highlight the requirements that SAPinsider members said were the most important to them in the Global Tax Management Benchmark Research Report.

Data is Key

In the benchmark report, SAPinsiders clearly prioritized the need for clean, standardized, real-time data over all other potential requirements. The survey found that 82% of respondents said that clean, harmonized master data was either important or very important—the highest share of all responses.

Following closely behind were 79% of respondents who said a single source of truth for reporting and audit purposes was important or very important. In third with 71% of respondents was intelligent and real-time tax determination and compliance reporting. The need for clean, harmonized data and a single source of truth is increasing. From 2021 to 2022, both top requirements saw increases of nine percentage points in the share of respondents who found them important or very important.

These top three requirements paint a clear picture—tax teams need information as quickly and accurately as possible. Organizations maintain multiple entities spread across various countries, each with its own unique tax regulations. Having multiple sources of data across transaction systems can result in inconsistency and errors, which can lead to tax compliance issues.

Meeting the Requirements

Above all other requirements, tax teams need access to clean, accurate, standardized, real-time data. This data makes it easier for those teams to avoid confusions, reduce audit risk, ensure compliance, and find errors.

Organizations should find solutions that help them centralize and automate their control framework. That will allow them to ensure data consistency and improve their strategy for improving the collection, transfer, and management of data. It helps improve order-to-cash (O2C), procure-to-pay (P2P), and record-to-report (R2R) flows.

In the next blog of this series, we will examine the technologies that organizations use to support their global tax management strategies.