Sovos Enhances Connector Marketplace Amid Tax Compliance Changes

Tax software firm Sovos has debuted an enhanced version of its Connector Marketplace.

The launch, announced Wednesday (April 10), makes it easier for customers and partners to connect to Sovos’ Compliance Cloud.

These connectors help companies implement Sovos’ tax compliance and regulatory reporting solutions into their enterprise financial systems, doing away with compatibility issues and ensuring data security and always-on compliance, the company said in a news release.

Sovos noted that government mandates around the world are forcing its customers and partners to meet new compliance standards, which can be tough for businesses that are running disparate systems and may not have the resources to develop connectors and APIs.

“Customers need the ability to connect to our solutions without significant development cycles to quickly meet changing business requirements,” said company CEO Kevin Akeroyd. “This is a core tenet to everything we do at Sovos.”

PYMNTS discussed the tax compliance changes facing businesses last month in a conversation with Steve Sprague, chief strategy and product officer at Sovos.

As he told PYMNTS, there was a time when corporate back offices were content to use legacy accounting systems and may have assumed that those systems will extract a “big enough file” to cover all of the diverse markets and tax reporting requirements around the world — from the U.S. to Brazil to Germany — depending on the scale of the company.

But now, he added, these organizations must deal with a third party operating “inside” the company: the government.

One of the most notable trends in tax policy, Sprague said, has been the movement of governments toward transactional collection via continuous transaction controls (CTCs), especially in Latin America and Europe. That’s a notable change, he added, from what’s traditionally been seen before, primarily in the U.S.

“Many individuals,” Sprague said, “viewed tax as something that happens on a quarterly basis or an annual basis. But around the world, it’s been moving from not only quarterly, but monthly … now it’s in real time.”

Governments are collecting companies’ invoices in real time, gleaning insight into those enterprises’ billing and accounts payable processes.

Also last month, Sovos teamed with PwC in Belgium to streamline the adoption of eInvoicing among businesses.

This partnership establishes a joint business relationship designed to improve the implementation of eInvoicing and eReporting solutions, the companies said.

“As companies navigate an increasingly interconnected and dynamic marketplace, the need for a more integrated eInvoice process has never been more crucial,” Ellen Cortvriend, partner at PwC in Belgium, said in a news release.