SAP tax calculation service

Companies across the world access new markets and embrace emerging business models, and SAP enables them by being a key partner in this journey across the world. A critical aspect of this is the localization of our customers’ global landscapes to ensure compliance. SAP HANA Cloud Platform’s business services enable this by offering localization capabilities as cloud based APIs. SAP tax calculation service offering within the SAP HANA Cloud Platform available as a REST API offers tax determination and computation powered by years of expertise that SAP has had in enabling our customers across the world .

The service offers global tax compliance by covering the legal aspects of tax computation for 75+ countries. Apart from the common list of countries like US, Canada, Australia & those in Western EU, it offers coverage for LATAM countries like Mexico & Brazil, Asian countries like China, Japan & India and Eastern EU countries. More countries are being added based on inputs from our customers.

The tax service offers the following features:

• Pre-delivered tax computation content
• Legal changes pertaining to tax calculation are kept updated in the service
• Ability for customers to fine tune and configure the tax computation
• VAT calculation for 75+ countries
• Withholding tax computation
• Deferred tax, deductibility and other financial relevant indicators
• Support for tax exemptions with legal reasons and certificates
• Multi-currency support and time bound tax rate support
• Support for most business process steps that need transactional tax computation like catalogs, contracts, requisitions, orders, carts, checkouts, invoices, advances and payments for both the purchase and sales side transactions
• Support for different tax computation sequences like net and gross
• Import and Export taxes
• All special tax situations like Reverse Input Tax Credit (RITC) for Canada, Reverse Charge for asset acquisition & triangulation within EU countries, Service tax / Excise tax / Cess for India, VAT withholdings for Mexico etc are fully covered
• The tax service uses the SAP HANA Cloud Platform as a central provisioning layer. It offers RESTfull services as APIs from this layer. The API can be directly integrated to any HCP application that has a need to calculate tax

The tax service on HCP is currently in private beta, and can be tested within the SAP YaaS marketplace. Here the service does a determination of the country of taxation and natively understands the ‘default’ (VAT) situation for that country including components and rates. This information is passed back as the tax lines relevant for the country / jurisdiction with the corresponding amounts.

Following are the steps to access the tax service –

• Access https://www.yaas.io/ (currently private beta) and register
• Once you have a user ID, login and go to the YaaS marketplace (https://market.yaas.io/#/packages/)
• Click on SAP Localization Hub: tax (preview)
• This gives you access to the documentation and capabilities of the tax service
• Subscribing (free trial access) to the service gives you access to the tax service on the Hybris portal and tax enables your web store
• All that is needed is to pass the transaction context to the service to identify the locations (shipping addresses etc) to get back the total tax amount

For a more detailed step by step description follow this blog.

One of the central differentiators of the SAP tax calculation service is the tax configuration content which is pre-delivered and bundled with the service. The localization know-how and global presence that SAP has, is effectively utilized here to engage with various legal bodies globally, interpret the changes on laws of taxation and convert those in the form of content that governs the tax service. This content is seamlessly pushed to the cloud hosted service so that the consumer always stays compliant for tax determination and calculation.

The tax calculation service is currently in the private beta phase (non-productive use only) and will be generically available soon. It will follow the standard SAP HANA Cloud Platform API pricing.

For queries contact: Praveenkumar A K or Sridhar Sundaram