RISE with SAP: Why Indirect Tax Should Be Included in Your Roadmap

Many organizations are moving to the cloud for greater scalability, cost-savings, security, flexibility, accessibility, and performance. To help SAP ERP customers overcome hurdles and accelerate their cloud adoption, SAP offers RISE with SAP, a single-source bundle of technology and services that provides business-transformation-as-a-service. Businesses looking to get the most out of their finance transformation efforts with RISE with SAP, should include indirect tax as part of their journey.

SAP, procure-to-pay and order-to-cash processes have a natural tie to indirect tax automation. For example, if you are deploying SAP Ariba, there is an opportunity to trigger tax estimates from your Ariba purchase requisitions, so you have the total cost needed for approval and budgeting purposes. That’s just one instance of how taxes add value to your overall migration strategy.

From a justification standpoint, managing indirect taxes are a key component of an SAP transformation journey not only because it’s a legal obligation of doing business — simply put, it can affect the bottom line. Satrajit Saha, Principal at Deloitte Tax LLP explained, “If indirect taxes (or leakage of indirect taxes) can be proven to be a part of the working capital — which is a direct savings to the finance department — then it’s a big benefit from an indirect tax standpoint. As a result, tax would need to have a seat at the table.”

Additionally, indirect tax compliance is part of the entire global transformation journey. “SAP customers looking at global tax determination are evaluating technology and process around global indirect tax compliance that will help simplify operations. All of that is part of the indirect tax journey within the SAP roadmap,” said Saha.

For those wanting to learn more about indirect tax and where it fits into a RISE with SAP roadmap, I recommend watching our recent webinar Don’t Stay in Your Lane! Combining Tax/IT in Your RISE with SAP Plan. Vertex experts in collaboration with Deloitte, break down valuable information on getting IT and tax on the same page to increase overall business efficiency and effectiveness.

Satrajit Saha, Principle of Tax Technology Consulting at Deloitte Tax LLP, is a contributor on this blog. Our recent collaborations include various presentations on trending topics in the tax technology industry.