Strengthening VAT Management: How Technology Can Help

It’s difficult to keep up with the incredible pace of innovation in our lives these days. For those of us who are still getting used to watching videos on our phones, it’s pretty amazing to learn a certain cell phone manufacturer’s latest release can run augmented reality apps and 3-D video games. Tax technologies for VAT are also advancing at an intense pace, though with much less fanfare (don’t expect virtual reality displays to pop up on your dashboards any time soon!). That’s a good thing though, because if there’s anywhere in indirect tax that the changes and challenges are accelerating, it’s in global VAT management.

If you haven’t investigated the technologies for a while, you may be surprised to find how deep the functionality has become and how many of the trickiest VAT issues these systems can tackle. For a quick overview of the state of the art technology, click over to the Vertex white paper Using Tax Technology to Strengthen End-to-End VAT Management. The report examines the challenges VAT teams are facing today and explains how an end-to-end VAT management solution can help, including:

• How tax engines support tax determination processes by eliminating the need for error-prone manual coding or difficult-to-update, hard-coded logic within automated systems;
• How end-to-end VAT management solutions support compliance by pulling data from ERP systems and/or tax engines to generate signature-ready returns; and
• How tax technology can help organizations build tax performance management, quality assurance and continuous improvement capabilities.

Innovative tax technology is a crucial part of the resource mix for today’s lean tax departments who require additional insights. As the white paper’s co-authors point out, “VAT processes are complex and tax technology is inevitable for organizations that need to better navigate their many challenges…Tax functions should have the right advanced tax technology in place that supports their unique needs, as well as those of the organization.”