Phenix Consulting: new solutions to optimize SAP

Phenix Consulting is a company led by 6 partners and a team of around 30 employees who have strong international business and working experience in SAP environments.

Our main business focus is to optimize SAP from a tax, financial and control perspective.

We are located in Amsterdam, Berlin, Cologne.

Products: Tax – standard audit file for tax purposes (SAF-T)

Based on the OECD requirements we developed an ERP system independent external solution that can combine data from different sources (i.e. SAP, Oracle and Sabrix).

Our solution provides a lean and flexible solution which extracts relevant data from any system automatically and transforms it into the country specific required XML format.

The output will be a correct SAFT-XML file.

Products: tax – e-Bilanz-cockpit for Germany

Phenix Consulting e-Bilanz Cockpit is an easy-to-use solution for German e-balance requirements. It is fully integrated into SAP, easily accessible and generic interface risks are avoided. One central screen with all functions at your fingertips.

The cockpit’s ten steps process provides a simple guideline to create and submit mandatory filings. The cockpit is user-friendly due to well-designed features, such as the drag & drop functionality for mapping the company’s chart of accounts to the required fiscal taxonomy.

The cockpit has an interface to non-SAP systems to enable upload of financial data from subsidiaries not running on SAP.

All the group’s tax balances can be created in and filed from one central SAP system via an audit-proof process. Any tax adjustments made in the cockpit does not influence SAP data and these adjustment could be tracked via a separate document journal.

Similar to SAP all entries and changes are recorded (full audit trail), ensuring that the cockpit meets high standards of IT and process security.

Services: SAP implementation and optimization

All of our consultants have a proven track record in implementing and optimizing SAP ERP at a broad variety of customers and industries.

Our service offering ranges from the functional improvement of existing SAP installations to full life-cycle implementation projects. Beside our business- and IT-expertise we also provide project management and development services.

Our distinguishing capabilities

We understand that no SAP implementation is alike – we recommend and implement the functionalities that best fit to your size, complexity and industry
We help you get the maximum out of SAP: we bring in best practice approaches and combine them with your individual requirements
For international rollouts we are best familiar with the local requirements even of highly specific countries such as Brazil, Russia or China
Our team of experienced consultants takes ownership and responsibility and pushes your project to success
We rely on a proven set of structured methods and tools that we can bring into the project

Other services in this line: Workflow optimization, Business Intelligence, Development Support

Services: Finance – cash management & liquidity management

Cash and liquidity management is becoming more and more crucial to each organization. Despite, many companies do not take full advantage of the system’s capabilities and run their processes and reporting on a semi-automated, or even spreadsheet based approach.

SAP offers an entire toolkit of functions related to cash-management topics that are branded as ‘financial supply chain management’:

Liquidity reporting and planning (cash position, liquidity forecast, liquidity planner, BO BPC)
Optimization of available cash (inhouse-cash)
Facilitation and automization of cash related transactions (electronic bank statement, bank communications Management)

To cover more specific requirements like loans management or hedge accounting SAP’s treasury and risk management solution (SAP TRM) is available.

Most of these functions can be implemented independently from each other. This brings a huge flexibility in terms what brings most benefits to an organization within reasonable time and budget.

Our recommended approach is to start with functional small packages (e.g. cash position, bank statement) and – once proven successful – implement subsequent add-ons.

Our distinguishing capabilities

We are not functionality-driven but instead develop and implement a sound roadmap towards an integrated cash- and liquidity management
We offer add-on products (e.g. EBS-Cockpit) to further drive efficiency in your cash processes
We are also best familiar with SAP’s treasury solutions

Other services in this line: consolidation optimization, intercompany optimization

Services: Tax – SAP implementation for VAT / GST

For nearly every company, the accuracy and efficiency of local-country VAT compliance is nearly completely dependent on the functionality of the underlying ERP system.

Operational malfunctions in a system that is used to manage VAT compliance can lead to substantial financial risks.

There are countless examples of the mismatching of VAT treatment of purchases and sales in chain transactions, double payments of VAT and “forgotten” manual adjustments to the VAT filing, all attributable to shortcomings in SAP’s automated VAT solution.

SAP VAT logic

The SAP VAT determination logic was developed a long time ago (1980’s) and except for the “plants abroad” logic SAP’s VAT determination logic has not changed.

This in contrast with the VAT rules and business models. A brief overview of some of these changes:

the EU VAT laws have been more harmonized (EU VAT directive)
substantial increase of cross border transactions
businesses are registered for VAT in multiple countries
businesses are operating more often under complicated principal structures
increased number of (integrated) inter-company and supply chain transactions

As a result, there has been a huge increase in the complexity for the SAP system to meet all VAT requirements, which leads to necessary modifications to the standard SAP VAT for many multinational businesses.

Modifications of already very complicated SAP systems create a risk for maintenance and half-hearted solutions.

At the same time, tax authorities across the world both sharpen their focus on non-compliant taxpayers and increase their focus on reviewing ERP systems as a source of VAT compliance risks.

Businesses have to ensure that the VAT determination logic in the SAP systems is correct, easy to implement and remains VAT compliant.

Our distinguishing capabilities

Phenix Consulting possesses practical experience and understands SAP’s possibilities, but also its limitations and thus the capability to free up resources, reduce manual activities and manage risks.

With respect to the possibilities, we can express the wishes to the external SAP consultant in his own language and we can demonstrate how these can actually be achieved in SAP.

In practice, we note that certain functionality intended for the support of indirect tax objectives does not get used – due either to reluctance (not within budget) or to a lack of knowledge in this area.

From an indirect tax standpoint, the realization that you are part of a larger team in which each of the participants have other priorities is key. This means that effective communication and agreements are essential.

Instructions must be understandable and so short and compact that they can also be used as a reference framework and material for the tests.

In practice, Excel is often used to record all transactions and to indicate what the VAT treatment, etc. We developed our own normative decision trees for effective communication resulting in effective workforce and less risks.

Other services in this line: SAP review,Tax Performance Consultancy

Services: Risk and Control – GRC, security and authorization management

Management of information security becomes more and more critical because of increasing regulatory requirements. A key to ensure adequate information security is the design, implementation and ongoing operation of the authorization concept in SAP.

Management and continuous monitoring of authorizations can be carried out in SAP directly or tool-based.

Our distinguishing capabilities

We approach information security in a combined approach bringing together our long-year audit experience and our technical excellence in setting up authorizations in SAP
We provide our own tools to quickly assess the quality of security and authorizations in your SAP system
Because we know the market well we can assist our client finding the right approach and tools to ensure sustainable compliance

Other services in this line: Internal Audit Optimization, Financial Audit Optimization