SAP Customisation verses Automation

Customisation and a changing business environment

Many companies are able to successfully customize their SAP system to deal with their business indirect tax requirements. However, they often run into trouble when requirements or legislation changes.

Such changes could be due to internal reasons (for example, business reorganisations or changes to the business model) or external reasons (changes to VAT rules, Brexit, EU , quick Fixes etc.)

Implementing  manual customisation

In such cases, it is crucial that any solution is flexible and scalable enough to deal with changing requirements. In practice, companies who have built their own in-house solution are required to carry out time consuming and expensive IT projects to deal with such changes.

These changes to SAP often have to be put on a long-term IT roadmap and as a result further immediate manual changes need to be made to the process. This basically defeats the purpose of doing things internally as companies will be back to doing things manually with all the risk this entails.

Conversely with the Meridian VAT Add-on, clients are able to rely on a solution that is being used by numerous multinationals and is constantly updated to deal with the latest complexities. The solution has been designed to provide Tax and Finance departments with control and ownership of VAT issues within the system.

As such, day to day changes can be accommodated within the standard solution (via flexible table entries) without requiring IT change requests. Furthermore, where there are significant changes to VAT rules (for example,  EU Quick Fixes, Brexit, etc) which require changes to the solution, this will be provided by Meridian to the entire install base as part of the maintenance package.