Andrew Karasev

SAP Business One as ERP Option when Multinational Corporation is Expanding to Brazil

Multinational Corporation typically has several objectives to ERP selection for its foreign subsidiary.

We would like to talk about the three which as statistically most important based on our clientele.  For CEO and Controller in USA based headquarters these are Financial and Operational Control via ERP, Consolidated Financial Reporting and Compliance to foreign country tax code.  For the controller in Brazil the priority might be listed in reverse order and they should be respected as he is responsible for local subsidiary and its compliance with local legislation and at the same time he probably doesn’t have much of the desire to be ‘micromanaged’ by the headquarters.  Let’s talk about these issues in some details:

1. Tax Calculation and Tax Rates Assignment.  It might sound a bit amazing for somebody who is specializing in CPA type of consulting practice that Brazil doesn’t give you the same formulae for every business.  Instead there are criteria based on your industry, your suppliers and type of product that you sell.  SAP B1 consultants spent something like one hundred or more consulting hours entering tax brackets manually after they are determined and calculated.  One of the problem is that Data Transfer Workbench doesn’t support tax tables and formulas import

2. Invoice reporting to IRS.  This is probably doing the same job as 1099 form filing in the United States.  However 1099 filing accuracy could be only confirmed through audit.  Brazilian government seems to be trying more real time control over your sales activity in real time.  However in the case of SAP Business One or as we believe in the case of other accounting systems popular in Brazil this initiative costs customers several thousand dollars in software licenses and additional implementation hours

3. These two paragraphs above are typically what your Brazilian subsidiary controller is concerned about.  Let’s now take a look at your priorities as you see them from the headquarters

4. Centralized Control.  This thing could be achieved by hosting the server for SAP B1 in one central location likely in the United States and having all the companies implemented from one template, including chart of accounts and major procedures.  Template in its turn requires one consulting firm to be responsible for its design and forcing subcontracted consultants to stick to its requirements

5. Consolidated Financial Reporting.  In the past Business One was portrayed as small business ERP application and if you are tiny business there is no need to do consolidated P&L or Balance Sheet.  However in recent move attributed to the year 2011 SAP recommended SAP BO to companies with up to one hundred and even two hundred named users.  This move definitely requires something similar to what we are finding in competition.  For example Microsoft Dynamics had FRx and now it is replaced by Microsoft Management Reporter with such concepts as Reporting Tree looking at GL Accounts and Transactions in multiple companies.  With version 8.82 we now see cross company consolidation instruments.  For earlier versions we were recommending GL transaction level consolidation in the form of moving all GL entries from all the companies to fictitious consolidated company where you can use Balance Sheet and Profit and Loss reporting from SAP BO user interface

6. Please call us 1-866-304-3265, 1-269-605-4904, help@efaru.com.  We have local presence in Chicagoland, Southern California, South West Michigan, Houston and Dallas areas of Texas. We serve customers USA and Canada nationwide and internationally via web sessions and phone conferences (Skype is welcomed).  We are working on Brazilian ERP consulting market in Sao Paulo since 2004

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