With the introduction of GST by the Indian government, many multinational clients have adjusted their implementations to cater to this requirement. This post is to discuss the challenges faced and the solutions adopted.
Our first challenge was that there was no standard solution published by Concur when SAP came out with its own recommendations for the ERP. We have to admit that the introduction of the new government mandate was sudden.
The next challenge was the locations in India were not associated with the states. We went through a mapping exercise. One finding is that a couple of states like Uttaranchal were not defined. SO we had to set these up as well.
Next comes the modification of expense entry forms. We evaluated the VAT on expense types and decided to limit the new setup for only 5 expense types out of a total exceeding 30. This was to keep things simple for the users.
Next came the Tax authority set up. The Indian setup now resembles that for Canada. The complexity is driven by the number of registered entities you have in India.
You will have to set up a manual tax calculation and open up the Tax fields for user input. This is because the calculation of tax base amount is not straightforward and it is not easy to mimic the tax calculation specified on the receipts. So allow users to input based on receipts.
Final tweaks were required to handle tax on itemized entries. Calculate tax link is only available on parent entries and we had to switch off the copy down on new GST related fields as the itemized entries may have different rates of GST. We wanted to avoid accidental change at parent level from changing child entries. I know that there is a big popup. However, users are used to ignoring popups.
A question that remains is to determine how to manage change in tax rates. If 3 out of 4 rates change, will we end up with 7 values in the drop-down? If yes, how long do we maintain the old values?
Best Regards,
Rohan
SAP Concur and SAP FICO Implementation Functional Consultant
