Sales and purchase transactions involve numerous data elements. For sales, these elements include addresses, products, quantities, discounts, and shipping costs. Purchase transactions, especially those from ERP or accounting systems, can include even more elements like GL account numbers, purchase order numbers, cost centers, vendor names, and more. Additionally, considerations for customer or vendor exemptions, jurisdictional allocations, and management of accruals and payments add to the complexity. This makes calculating the correct sales tax or consumer use tax very challenging.
Further complicating matters, companies often have various customizations in place for their internal accounting. There can be up to 20 additional elements when recording sales or purchases, with these elements and their values differing by legal entity, business unit, or product line. Each element can impact how a transaction is identified for tax calculation purposes.
To address this complexity, we developed the CereTax rules engine, designed to handle all these scenarios. It uses if-then conditions that are easily configured to evaluate any value for the provided data. The data elements used by the rules can be weighted to create a hierarchy of importance, allowing for numerous rule configuration options to manage complex data requirements.
Moreover, the CereTax interface supports an unlimited number of user-specified data elements and values. Users can label each specific element within the platform to include it as an additional rule configuration element. Data values can be grouped into lists or key/value pairs for lookups during rule execution. The possibilities for data evaluation within the CereTax rules engine are virtually limitless.
Given the robust data capabilities of the rules engine, transparency throughout the process is essential. An audit layer logs all actions, events, and outcomes generated by the rules engine. From the source transaction through all evaluated and executed rules to the final transactional data and computed tax, a detailed history of events is available for review. This provides complete visibility into the entire workflow, creating a streamlined audit trail.
The CereTax rules engine offers many additional features and benefits that are too numerous to cover in a single blog post. We believe that the functionality, capability, transparency, and audit trail of our rules process set CereTax apart from all legacy tax engines.
Want to see how the power of CereTax can help your business manage sales tax operations?
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Mike Sanders Co-Founder and CEO, CereTax |
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