In retail, tax management is a complex task, involving the issuance of invoices, monitoring legislative changes, and calculating taxes. The automation of these processes is essential to reduce manual workload and minimize human errors, allowing employees to focus on more strategic tasks.
It is known that in Brazil, the bureaucracy involved in fiscal documents also carries an advantage: we are one of the few countries that centralize information about the commercial and fiscal transaction in the same document, which is official and auditable. Furthermore, each invoice contains more than 600 fields, many of which are validated by the tax authority itself, and they contain relevant information about your business, product, supplier, and transporter. Therefore, beyond all the attached tax and procedural obligations, the note also provides a competitive advantage to those who know how to analyze it and create alerts about its fields.
“Technologies are crucial to ensuring compliance and efficiency in tax management, but also to transform data into strategic insights in a timely manner. At their peak, they offer the ability to convert tax bureaucracy into a competitive advantage, essential for survival and sustainable growth in the highly dynamic retail environment,” he says.Marcus Araújo, Head of Data & Principal Data Scientist atI archived, a platform responsible for managing tax documents for more than 140 thousand companies.
The specialist explains the importance of automating administrative processes in retail companies and discusses how to leverage tax data for business benefits.
Strategic tax management
The implementation of an ERP, a management software for retail companies, is crucial for performing managerial controls efficiently. This includes cost price management, profit margin calculation, selling price, inventory control, and invoice issuance. An automation system integrates the various areas of the company, optimizing tasks and increasing operational and financial efficiency.
Based on my experience, analyses with a broad strategic scope usually take 80 to 90% of the time on tasks to research and consolidate information, that is, out of every 10 hours of work, 2 hours are actually dedicated to analysis. Additionally, it can take 3 to 4 versions before a decision is made. Having an integrated ERP with all useful and organized information sources can therefore save data cleaning time and reduce the time to decision-making, with an effectiveness of up to five times and more well-founded analyses, evaluates Araújo.
Aligning the ERP with tax data automation is becoming essential for retail to make informed and effective decisions. The extraction and analysis of tax data allow retailers to identify purchasing patterns, seasonality, and consumer preferences. This information is vital to optimize inventory and plan marketing campaigns more accurately.
"In the retail market, there are different quantities of invoice volumes. Some companies need to import a few hundred invoices monthly, while others process up to 30 million invoices per month. A good example of this occurred when a retail giant needed to reduce errors in reconciling purchase orders with supplier invoices. The delay and failure in this process were impacting various areas of operations across Brazil. After automating the capture and structuring of invoices, they not only mitigated errors but also gained visibility into which suppliers most and least comply with their obligations. This visibility and control over suppliers allowed for better policy design to ensure predictability for all stakeholders (supplier, warehouse, stores, and end consumer)," comments the expert.
Implementing automated and strategic tax management brings numerous benefits to retail, such as tax control and cost reduction. Automation provides greater financial control, allowing for proper product and tax parameterization, as well as more efficient inventory management.
Productivity optimization and tax compliance can also be mentioned.The integration of processes and company areas optimizes productivity, allowing for comprehensive analysis and more accurate decision-making.
Furthermore, automation allows for continuous monitoring of tax data, ensuring compliance with government regulations and mitigating the risk of penalties.
