Why do people keep buying buckets?

Unless you’ve been sequestered in the basement of an abandoned house, located on a remote island and with no communications, you’ll be aware of the changes being adopted globally by tax authorities – the ones that require us to provide more information – faster – when it comes to tax.

For an extra degree of not-so-welcome complexity, those of us with tax regimes in the EU are on the receiving end of an unprecedented scale of discord between member states when it comes to VAT compliance and reporting. There’s a common thread of course, with pretty much every country doing something similar but in an all together dissimilar manner! SAF-TSAF-T (Standard Audit File for Tax) is a file type based on the XML standard. It is created in a standard readable format from data exports taken from accounting records. SAF-T is used internationally to ensure the fast and secure digital transfer of tax information. It is known for its high level of security, ability to simplify the collection of tax data and simple readability due to its standardised format. comes in more flavours than Ben and Jerry’s, Split Payments are splitting opinion and live-invoicing is not really tax but more about interfacing (differently for each country, naturally).

So with all these changes, why are so many companies fixated on buying a bucket when they really need to fix the leak?

It was in speaking to another company recently, that it became clear to us that their tax framework was not setup correctly; lacking both detail and automation in their design with heavy manual interference when it came to the tax rate determination. And yet, they were hell bent on buying a reporting tool to help with their VAT compliance because they’d been fined (repeatedly) when they should have been looking at fixing their tax automation – all because there’s no way to improve your compliance if it is garbage in = garbage out.

So to all those IT managers out there tasked with sorting their tax compliance out, don’t be afraid to seek help – you cannot be expected to know everything when it comes to tax determination and the correct way to set your tax solution up and the more you know, the better your decisions will be.