Crossborder Compliance on Taxes, Without Taxing Effort

Cross-border transactions, and the tracking of business in separate locations in general, benefit from technology. As firms expand their reach and become global in scope, as to their supplier base and the customers they serve, doing business in different countries across currencies has logistical challenges.  Those challenges also extend into compliance arenas, where rules governing taxes and other money transfers, documentation and compliance issues can be labyrinthine.

Late last month, TIE Kinetix said that it incorporated global eInvoicing and eArchiving compliance methods from TrustWeaver, integrating those features into the former’s FLOW Partner Automation Platform.

The firms said TIE Kinetix can now support its own client roster with eInvoicing that is compliant with rules governing issuing, receiving and storing of documents across 55 countries. Many of those countries also have outlawed paper invoicing, so digital record keeping and audit trails are mandatory and may need to be embraced immediately by companies seeking to enter new markets.

In an interview with PYMNTS, Jan Sundelin, CEO of TIE Kinetix, said that among the biggest verticals to realize demand for these services are retail and also food and beverage firms. And beyond that, while larger firms, regardless of industry, may use EDI systems to manage document flow, smaller firms need to work with management systems to ensure timely communication with supply chain partners and also satisfy legal requirements.

Sundelin noted that the partnership is one that seeks “to serve the digital needs” of firms as they deal with trading partners and government organizations and especially “as they need more security” for those documents. Dealing with each country means dealing with local tax jurisdictions, and digital supply chains, so to speak, must work in tandem with real-world ones. Smaller firms, he said, with say 5,000 to 6,000 invoices flowing through the business on a monthly basis, can see such eInvoicing initiatives as a “pain point.” He added it is crucial for companies and their supply chain partners to give “the right forms of invoices,” noting formats such as PDFs.

Technology, and the compliant paperless invoicing initiative, said Sundelin, also allow for tracking, which is especially useful in emerging markets and economies in tracing the flow of goods and services across orders, invoices and shipping notes. Such tracking involves eSignatures and can lead to better customer satisfaction, along with fewer errors that might otherwise be tied to manual entry of data.