The importance of setting up your eBTax solution correctly first time

If you don’t use the correct solution right first time then you are going to create a lot of issues later on.

A recent client of mine had a heavily customised eBTax solution which was heavily intertwined with the rest of the ERP setup. The problem is that the original tax solution was poorly designed in the first place and where eBTax functionality existed to handle most of the client’s requirements, it was not used and so customisations were used instead to drive the tax. Now we are faced with the task of correcting the eBTax solution to a fully automated one but we have to take the approach like peeling back the layers of an onion as we don’t know how deep the customisations go and whether removing the customisation effects other functionality.

Due to the complex nature of the clients business processes there was always going to be a requirement to customise the tax solution but the customisations should have been about customising the data used by the tax engine and not customising the tax engine itself.
Had the client set up the correct tax solution platform in the first place, then the customisations would have been minimised and the extent the customisations affected other modules would be almost non-existent.
So, make sure the ‘base’ tax solution follows best practice and then build around this, rather than putting in a partial tax solution and customising it to fit around the business processes.