Like all configurations, VAT should be thoroughly tested prior to making it available to your users. Since these configurations dictate your tax reclaim that you'll be presenting to the Tax Authority, you want to make sure that things are working properly before taking it live.
As we've gone through the lessons in this training course, we've mentioned a few items that can help make the testing of your VAT configurations more efficient. In this lesson, we'll call them out and take a look at your options and how they can help in the testing process.
The three items we'll take a closer look at our tax visibility settings, easy amounts to use to test the calculations in the UI, and running an integration test.
Tax Visibility Settings
In the lesson that covered the Employee Related Configurations tab, you learned that there's a setting for each configuration called Tax Data on User Form that has three options – Hidden, Read-Only, and Modify.
As a quick refresher, here's how each setting impacts the end user.
- Hidden
- The system performs the tax calculations, but the results of those calculations are not displayed to the user.
- Read-Only
- The system performs the tax calculation and presents the results to the user in a non-editable field. The user must save and reopen the expense to see the results.
- Modify
- The user is presented with a Calculate Tax link. This option allows the user to force the system to calculate the taxes on-demand. The user does not need to save and reopen the expense to see the results. Furthermore, the user has the ability to modify the results of the calculation.
As you can probably guess, when you are testing your tax configurations, using the Read-Only or Modify option is recommended. This allows you to fully test all of your tax rates and tax groups without having to generate a Standard Account Extract (SAE) or create a report in Cognos to see the taxes. This is a huge time saver, as you can easily switch back and forth between your configuration and your user session. Just remember to adjust this setting to the appropriate option for your production users when you are done testing.
Amounts to Use
In the Calculating VAT lesson, you learned the two-step process for calculating taxes. As long as you know the expense amount and the tax rate, the calculation is straightforward.
The good news is there is an even easier way to test tax calculations: if you know the tax rate, you can enter an expense amount of 100 + the tax rate, and the taxes will calculate to be the tax rate, every time.
For example, if you know that the tax rate for a specific expense is 19%, you can enter the expense amount of 119. The taxes will be 19, every time.
The bad news is that this method only works if you're manually entering expenses. If you're using test credit card data, you probably won't have nice easy numbers to work with. Also, if you are testing an expense type that has different tax rates in different scenarios, like Taxis in Germany, this method may not work either.
When in doubt, there are a number of websites you can use to help with calculating VAT. None of these are built by, owned by, or sponsored by SAP Concur, and SAP Concur cannot vouch for the results, but they're a quick way to check your math. A simple internet search for "VAT Calculators" will bring up several results.
Integration Testing
Once the testing of the configurations and calculations is completed, you should run your financial integration process to make sure the data generated by the tax configurations can be correctly posted into your financial systems.
Depending on your process, how to do this will vary greatly for each customer, so we won't go into the details here. Just make sure that you work with your internal technical integration team to make sure the data generated in SAP Concur is properly accounted for in your financial system.
The next lesson will focus on the most common method for posting data from SAP Concur to your financial systems.
Now that you've configured and tested your configuration, the next step is to work on integrating the tax data with your financial system. The next lesson will focus on how the tax data appears in the Standard Accounting Extract (SAE).