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erika_buson
Advisor
Advisor
Tax authorities have been continuously increasing the number and complexity of legal mandates. They are now taking digitalization to the next level, introducing potentially disruptive changes that make the adoption of new technologies essential for enterprises to remain compliant. As a result, you will find your business needing to send electronic documents in real-time, verifying consistency between your system of records and authorities’ platforms and submitting returns, all electronically.

Beside the fact that this forces compliance to be embedded into business processes and prevents the opportunity to have ‘after the fact’ corrections, tax authorities now have visibility over transactions before your tax department has even seen the outcomes. This also introduces the need of a seamless integration to local platforms worldwide. Thus, it is fundamental to have a sustainable IT landscape and be prepared to rapidly respond to all new requirements that are emerging across the globe.

SAP Document and Reporting Compliance can help your business overcome these challenges and fulfill local compliance mandates, such as electronic documents and statutory reporting, by creating a scalable foundation to respond to emerging regulations without putting business continuity at risk.

To learn more about SAP Document and Reporting Compliance, check out this blog and this information sheet.

 

A new version of SAP Document and Reporting Compliance, cloud edition is now available!

In December 2022, SAP has released a new version of SAP Document and Reporting Compliance, cloud edition. This is not a solution replacement moving SAP Document and Reporting Compliance to the cloud in its entirety. Instead, it is a scalable cloud service that allows to connect your business systems (SAP S/4HANA Cloud, SAP S/4HANA, SAP ERP, SAP Business Network, Concur Expense and more) to local authorities and platforms to automate compliance within your business processes.

This new cloud service is complementary to your business systems (including SAP Document and Reporting Compliance framework in SAP S/4HANA Cloud, SAP S/4HANA and SAP ERP), and it acts as a streamlined hub to centralize compliance across your enterprise, eliminating the need to implement local solutions for each country or scenario or business system.


Fig. 1: SAP Document and Reporting Compliance


 

All the business systems and scenarios supported with SAP Document and Reporting Compliance, cloud edition can be found here.

Updating SAP Document and Reporting Compliance, cloud edition to the latest version does not disrupt the regulations already supported with the combination of SAP Integration Suite and SAP Document and Reporting Compliance for SAP S/4HANA Cloud, SAP S/4HANA and SAP ERP: existing scenarios continue to be maintained and the solution continues to run without disruptions.

For each country scenario, you can check if the integration to local authorities and platforms is enabled with SAP Document and Reporting Compliance, cloud edition or SAP Integration Suite in SAP Help using the column ‘Supported Submission Type’:

For a given country scenario, you can’t choose between SAP Document and Reporting Compliance, cloud edition and SAP Integration Suite (customer-managed tenant), they are not interchangeable. Only one solution is supported per country / scenario so no migration of existing regulations can be initiated at this stage.

And, if you have the previous version of SAP Document and Reporting Compliance, cloud edition you can migrate to the latest one free of charge, check details here. Don’t lose time, it is very easy to migrate to the new solution, and this gives you the foundation you need to respond to the new regulations such e-invoices in Poland (KSeF), e-invoices and e-reporting in France, and more.

 

Cloud or On-Premise? No dilemmas!

If you have been wondering if you should consider SAP Document and Reporting Compliance ‘on-premise’ or ‘cloud’, the good news is that you don’t have to make a choice. SAP Document and Reporting Compliance consists of two parts:

  • One in the business systems to make compliance a seamless step within your business processes, with no data redundancy and no data replication. This follows the deployment of your applications, hence it’s On-Premise if your ERP is On-Premise, cloud otherwise.

  • One on SAP Business Technology Platform (always ‘Cloud’) to scale and simplify electronic integration to local authorities and platforms. As mentioned above, this can be SAP Document and Reporting Compliance, cloud edition or the customer-managed SAP Integration Suite tenants depending on the country/scenario (again, not interchangeable for the same scenario).


Both components complement each other to give you a comprehensive solution to manage electronic compliance end-to-end.


Fig. 2: Native Compliance in your Business Systems and Seamless Integration with Local Authorities and Platforms


 

Are you now wondering what ‘SAP Document and Reporting Compliance, on-premise edition’ exactly is?

  1. In the past, integrations to enable the electronic exchange of business documents with Tax Authorities were enabled by providing integration flows on SAP Business Accelerator Hub that can be deployed on your instance of SAP Integration Suite. We refer to this as PaaS or SAP Document and Reporting Compliance, on-premise edition as this is the name of the (historic) license that provides you with the legal content required to remain compliant. Yes, it is called ‘on-premise’, but it’s not on-premise in its totality as it requires SAP Integration Suite that is a suite in the cloud.


To be even more precise, SAP Document and Reporting Compliance, on-premise is the name of the license for SAP ERP. It was also offered to enable electronic documents with SAP S/4HANA until October 2021, but it is now part of SAP Document and Reporting Compliance for SAP S/4HANA providing a comprehensive offer for electronic documents and statutory reporting.




  1. In the more recent years, SAP started to offer the integration as a service to minimize the implementation effort on your side and ongoing maintenance. It doesn’t run on your instance of SAP Integration Suite so SAP can take care of upgrades and maintain connections to external platforms on your behalf. This is SAP Document and Reporting Compliance, cloud edition - SAP’s strategic offering for the latest requirements to streamline integrations with local authorities and platforms.


As explained above, SAP Document and Reporting Compliance, cloud edition doesn’t replace the functionalities provided within the business systems (e.g. SAP S/4HANA Cloud, SAP ERP, etc.). In fact, in both cases, the electronic documents and statutory reports are enabled leveraging the same applications in the business systems, allowing you to embed compliance within your processes with one user-experience and one process standardized worldwide, irrespective of how the integration to local authorities and platforms is enabled.

As a result, you can further streamline your integration with local authorities and platforms without a negative impact to your running landscape:

  • If you have been adopting SAP Document and Reporting Compliance to respond to existing regulations across countries, you can continue to leverage it and scale further to respond to the new mandates standardizing your processes worldwide.

  • If you are considering to adopt SAP Document and Reporting Compliance to respond to the many emerging regulations requiring integration with local authorities’ platforms, you can take advantage of the latest offering to build a foundation to automate compliance in the digital world.


 

Are you using SAP S/4HANA Cloud and SAP S/4HANA? You can simplify compliance further!

As of today, the electronic submission of statutory reports is still enabled with a dedicated cloud service (SAP Document and Reporting Compliance service), but, if you are live or implementing SAP S/4HANA Cloud or SAP S/4HANA, there is one more good news for you: further simplification is on its way and SAP Document and Reporting Compliance, cloud edition will be extended to replace SAP Document and Reporting Compliance service and become the sole solution enabling all integrations provided as a public cloud service, both electronic documents and statutory reports (except for  NFe in Brazil – for now!).

 

In summary, depending on the country/scenario, you can manage your electronic documents and statutory reports in the business systems, such as SAP S/4HANA Cloud, SAP S/4HANA, SAP ERP, SAP Business Network, etc., and handle the communication to local authorities and platforms either via SAP Document and Reporting Compliance, cloud edition or SAP Integration Suite. A comprehensive solution to scale compliance worldwide.

 

For more detailed insights on SAP Document and Reporting Compliance and the cloud edition, see:
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