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How confident are you about your VAT compliance?

15th Oct 2018
Brought to you by
SAP

SAP® Concur® is the world’s leading brand for travel, expense and invoice management solutions.

Save content
Have you found this content useful? Use the button above to save it to your profile.

Submitting VAT returns can cause a flutter of nerves. What if you’ve accidentally done something wrong?

VAT is a complex area and feeling confident you are complying with the regulations at all levels is tricky, especially when it comes to travel and expenses. Here are the areas where businesses are most likely to run into difficulties and how to avoid them:

Inadvertently submitting fraudulent data

Don’t just assume the travel and expense forms and receipts you have submitted is correct as HMRC will want to review your entire system from end-to-end if it decides to audit. That includes checking whether you have clear and enforced processes and all the appropriate checks and controls in place.

If you feel you may need a helping hand, auditing services like Concur Audit gives you back the time you spend reviewing expenses and provides exceptional visibility into your spend. As part of its process, Concur Audit checks the receipt status and VAT calculations against receipts for improved tax and regulatory compliance.

Falling foul of international requirements

If you or any other company employee travels to the EU (or further abroad) on business, knowing what and how to reclaim the VAT on the expenses is tricky. You’re faced with two choices: run the risk of submitting non-compliant data or don’t claim at all.

To make sure you’re not losing out financially and can ease the burden of making sure you have dotted the i’s and crossed the t’s, SAP Concur has partnered with a number of tax reclaim experts to help streamline foreign VAT recovery.

Missing the deadlines

Maybe gathering all the information together took longer than usual. Maybe you were involved in another complex project and the need to submit a VAT return simply slipped your mind. Whatever the reason, when you miss a deadline, your business isn’t compliant.

There are two solutions:

  • Put together a compliance calendar that includes the deadlines you need to meet to submit on time.
  • Make the process less time-intensive: Tools such as Concur Expense and Concur TripLink mean you’re capturing information all the time, giving you visibility into spend much earlier in the process.

Not learning from experience

Don’t rely on an expert who knows the process inside out. Make sure you know what to do so that you are not caught off guard if they are off sick or leave the company. You can do this by putting together a process document that captures the who, what, where, when, why and how of VAT returns. It should be detailed enough so that someone who has never done it before can use it to complete the work successfully.

Where next?

If you’re looking for solutions to help your business manage compliance across your travel, expense and invoice spend, SAP Concur has the answer.

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