SAP Document and Reporting Compliance – Statutory Reporting framework enables global customers to comply with local compliance mandates worldwide. With 300+ standard statutory reports, the framework fulfills an extensive list of statutory reporting requirements across geographies. However, estimations by analysts suggest that there are more than a thousand statutory reports that a global organization would have to submit to the various tax authorities. Additionally, based on the business process preferences, organizations may want to adapt the standard reports as well. 

This is where the extensibility capabilities of the framework come to the fore. Leveraging SAP’s extensive experience in supporting diverse legal requirements worldwide, the extensibility features of the framework are designed to enable our customers and partners fulfill the varied statutory reporting requirements, which are not supported by SAP as standard, by easily adapting the generic artifacts enabled by the framework. 

Generic Artifacts 

Let us take a look at what these generic artifacts are and how they can be utilized by customers and partners:  

• Generic Reusable Artifacts 

• • Generic Report Definitions and Categories

The framework has enabled a set of generic reports for some of the common statutory reporting requirements. These generic reports are already designed in such a way that they fulfill most of the commonly occurring legal requirements for a specific kind of reporting such as Value Added Tax, Withholding Tax, Cash flow statement etc. These generic reports can then be easily adapted to suit the variations in the country-specific requirements. For partners and customers, these generic reports are highly beneficial as they do not need to create custom reports from scratch.  

You can read more about how the framework’s Design Time works here: 

Blog series on Define Compliance Reports app 

You can read more about the generic report definitions and categories here: 

Reusable objects in Statutory Reporting  

• • Reusable Reporting Activities

The framework also delivers standard reporting activities which enable end-to-end statutory reporting processes. These standard reporting activities are: 

1. 1. 1. Tax Compliance Checks
      2. Manage Tax Items
      3. Post Tax Payables

Customers and partners can readily use these standard activities in the custom statutory reports in addition to creating their own custom reporting activities. 

• • Reusable Core Dara Services (CDS) views 

These CDS views are modeled upon the standard tables where tax data, master data, configuration etc. is persisted. With these CDS views already enabling the standard reports in the framework, they can be readily used to enable custom statutory reports as well. By passing the relevant filters to the CDS views, information pertaining to specific statutory reporting scenarios can be extracted and be used to populate a legal report.  

These views are available across business topics such as VAT, Withholding Tax etc. The names of these CDS views typically begin with I_STRP. 

How have customers and partners benefited 

With these generic artifacts, the extensibility capabilities of the framework have made it tremendously easy for our customers to increase their statutory reporting footprint worldwide. We have already seen examples where some of our prominent customers have made use of these generic artifacts to create custom reports in 5-7 days and have gone live with these custom reports within 12-14 days from the inception of the development process. 

A global FMCG conglomerate made use of the extensibility capabilities of the framework to create around 100 custom statutory reports across 35 countries. This not only helped them in covering statutory reporting scenarios which are not supported in standard by SAP but also greatly accelerated the digital transformation of their legal reporting across the globe. We have already seen more than 35+ custom statutory reports being developed by our partners using the framework’s extensibility features and being offered to the users of the framework.   

It is very evident that there are manifold advantages of enabling extensibility with generic artifacts: 

• Our customers already have a reference point when they start the process of creating custom reports 
• The effort required to create custom reports is reduced thus resulting in reduced costs 
• Customers can start using these reports in a productive environment early thus enabling them to increase their global statutory reporting coverage at an increased pace
• Harmonized user experience for business users across standard and custom statutory reports thus helping our customers save on training costs

SAP Document and Reporting Compliance- Statutory Reporting framework has ensured that its extensibility features not only enable customers to easily create custom statutory reports but also scale up their global statutory reporting coverage efficiently and at a rapid pace thus delivering on its promise of true global compliance.