As from SAP S/4HANA 2022 (and earlier versions with later support packages), Advanced Compliance Reporting (ACR) has been replaced with Statutory Reporting as a part of the SAP Document and Reporting Compliance framework (DRC). These reports not only help you stay legally compliant by incorporating legal changes, but also to keep in touch with the latest technology and innovation in SAP. It is, of course, always recommended that you use the latest set of reports available with the SAP Document and Reporting Compliance framework.
SAP has combined SAP Document Compliance and SAP Advanced Compliance Reporting (ACR) into one integrated solution: SAP Document and Reporting Compliance (DRC) to give companies a full solution to approach difficulties in compliance reporting. It is one SAP solution to fulfill all types of legal requirements from real-time electronic business documents to statutory reports and helps businesses to approach the emerging number of continuous transaction controls (CTC). A combined way of approaching all types of obligations is a crucial prerequisite to facilitate reconciliation and guarantee consistency between real-time business document submissions and statutory reports as this becomes the new operating standard. This blog will focus on statutory reporting as a part of SAP Document and Reporting Compliance.
What is Statutory Reporting?
Statutory reporting is a universal compliance reporting solution that helps you to generate, create, and submit statutory reports to the authorities on time and in the right format. It helps you to stay compliant with ever-changing and complex legal requirements.
The main benefit of Statutory reporting in SAP S/4HANA is that it is a unique and competitive statutory reporting framework that allows you to manage your regulatory requirements all over the world. The framework offers features that ensure your complex and diverse legal reporting needs are addressed in a uniform, easy-to-use, and efficient manner. As a comprehensive global reporting solution, the SAP Document and Reporting Compliance framework provides an integrated and real-time view of your compliance status across regions and enables you to draw meaningful conclusions. One of the biggest strengths of the framework is that it offers an extensibility platform to SAP partners and customers to create new statutory reports or enhance the existing reports.
SAP Document and Reporting Compliance helps companies to stay compliant in the digital world and beyond. With its streamlined approach to tax compliance and embedded automation, the solution allows us to re-think compliance processes maximizing efficiency, reducing both compliance risks and costs, and increasing the sustainability of tax operations.
Basic and Advanced Statutory Reporting
Statutory reporting consists of a basic and an advanced version, where the features differ between the two versions, along with the license information.
The two versions of this statutory reporting solution are divided as below:
- The basic statutory reporting features are part of SAP S/4HANA Enterprise Management, and you can use it to generate and submit periodic and ad hoc reports manually or electronically to the tax authorities, view the reporting activities, schedule report runs, and so on.
- The advanced statutory reporting features include defining or extending new reports, preview, embedded analytics, workflow for approval, and so on, which require an additional license.
Countries supported by SAP Document and Reporting Compliance
Since last year, the ready-to-use scenarios have been expanded to cover 416 regulations (of which 35 new scenarios with the latest SAP S/4HANA Cloud releases) across 57 countries:
Angola
Austria
Bulgaria
China
Denmark
France
Hungary
Ireland
Japan
Malaysia
New Zealand
Peru
Portugal
Russia
Singapore
South Korea
Switzerland
Türkiye
United Kingdom
Argentina
Belgium
Canada
Colombia
Egypt
Germany
India
Israel
Kazakhstan
Mexico
Norway
Philippines
Qatar
Saudi Arabia
Slovakia
Spain
Taiwan
Ukraine
United States of America
Some examples of available statutory reports in SAP DRC are:
- Periodic VAT Returns
- Withholding Tax Reports
- EC Sales Lists
- Financial Statements
- SAF-T Audit Files
- GST Goods and Service Tax Reports
- …
How to Run Statutory Reports
With the ´Run Statutory Reports´ app in SAP Fiori, you can get an improved analysis of your statutory reporting tasks, and you can stay in touch with the submission deadlines. The app provides a smooth process for creating and sending statutory reports to the authorities on time and acts as a constant monitor of submission statuses. It is built on a comprehensive feature-rich framework that can support the statutory reporting requirements of several countries.
To support the country or region-specific legal requirements, the general features of the framework can be used and enabled by business users such as G/L Accountants, Tax Accountants, and so on. These features include (amongst others):
- Reporting Dashboard to Monitor Status
Reporting dashboard provides a quick overview of the reporting status – completed, overdue, due soon, and so on. It allows users to plan their tasks accordingly.
- Report Run Options
You can schedule the report generation based on your requirements. You can choose to generate the report immediately or schedule the runs for a later point in time. You can also cancel the report runs that are in process. - Correction, Additional Correction, and Clarification Phases
In Statutory reporting, you can submit the declaration phase. In addition to the declaration phase, if required, you can also submit a correction, additional correction, and clarification phases. Note that the phases can be submitted single or multiple times based on your country/region-specific compliance requirements. - Preview
Statutory reporting supports the generation of multiple output formats, such as XML, XBRL, TXT, JSON, and so on. The preview option in the Run Statutory Reports app allows you to visualize and interpret output formats in a user-friendly and consistent manner. - Manual Adjustment
You can make manual changes to the document data after the document has been generated and before you submit it to the tax authorities. When you regenerate the document after performing manual adjustment, the selected document and its associated documents get regenerated at the same time.
- Manual Submission to the Government Authorities
With the Run Statutory Reports app, you can choose to submit the statutory reports manually. For example, for some countries, you may be required to submit your statutory reports through authorized government gateways. You can copy the information provided by the Run Statutory Reports app, and manually enter it on the authorized portals. - Electronic Verification of Content Before Submission
You can generate reports in the legally required format and verify the content before submitting them to the government. This ensures that the generated report complies with all the statutory reporting requirements. - Electronic Submission to the Government Gateway
You can generate reports in the legally required format and submit them directly to the government. Based on the status of the submission, the reporting status gets updated as either accepted or rejected.
Electronic submission to the tax authorities can be configured using the SAP Localization Hub, a Statutory reporting service.
How PIKON can help you with your international compliance project
We are here if you need more information on SAP Statutory Reporting or if you have any other questions regarding compliance with country-specific legal requirements (tax reporting requirements, e-invoicing requirements, …) in your SAP system (ECC or S/4HANA). Please don’t hesitate to leave a comment in the Comments section below or request a web meeting through the button above. I am happy to help you.
With our established “Competence Centre for Legal Requirements” we have up-to-date knowledge about the different country-specific legal requirements worldwide and know how to ensure that your SAP system and business processes meet these requirements, with the desired customization for your company. Our team of experts is extensively trained and experienced thanks to the many projects we did over the years. These projects include country-specific legal requirements, such as e-invoicing in Mexico (CFDI), Italy (SDI), Spain (SII), Hungary (RTIR), VAT reporting in the UK (MTD-VAT), e-accounting with SAF-T in France, Portugal, and Poland, the Whitelist Check for Poland, next to more general accounting standards such as Lease Accounting under IFRS16 and SEPA.