How Edge Computing Helps Retail Tax Groups

Retail and e-commerce companies are striving to simplify and centralise their tax processing reporting environment.  

As retailers progress towards this goal, tax groups must address obstacles within their direct control along with challenges related to tax-adjacent processes. These issues include:  

• Inconsistent customer experiences across sales channels
• Contradictory tax calculations and errors across different sales channels
• Higher hardware and maintenance costs
• Redundant data entry and excessive tax data mapping
• An overreliance on manual processes
• An inability to quickly support new channels, payment mechanisms and product categories
• Delays in payment processing and invoicing
• Transaction processing latency, especially during daily or seasonal sales spikes
• A higher likelihood of in-store system downtime due to inconsistent and/or limited bandwidth.

Regarding the final challenge, retailers want latency to be extremely low on all tax determinations, regardless of whether that transaction takes place in stores or on a digital channel. Some larger e-commerce companies and retailers want more containerisation and additional ease of management. Edge computing satisfies those needs and others. Here are the most common tax compliance improvements and innovations we’ve seen tax groups implement with support from an edge computing solution:

• Offline resiliency: Maximising offline resiliency for in-store checkouts keeps lines moving without sacrificing omnichannel features or accuracy.
• E-commerce performance improvements: Creating high-performance and highly scalable checkouts for e-commerce operations ensures that your site keeps taking orders even during the highest traffic times.  
• On-time updates: Installing proper remote cluster management on calculation endpoints ensures that updates from the tax department make it to production checkout on time and wherever you need to calculate tax.
• Centralised control: Centralised configuration and reporting for all local tax engines provides complete visibility and the ability to manage updates from a single location.
• Enhanced security: Controlling connectivity at every endpoint means sensitive processes can stay secure and continue to work independently of network availability.  

As retailers continue to develop innovative ways to enhance the customer experience, tax groups should remain in lock step. Keeping pace requires tax compliance to be accurate, fast, flexible and scalable – qualities that happen to be enabled by edge computing.