In retail, tax management is a complex task, involving the issuance of invoices, monitoring of legislative changes, and tax calculation. Automating these processes is essential to reduce manual workload and minimize human error, allowing employees to focus on more strategic tasks.
It is known that in Brazil, the bureaucracy involved in tax documents also carries an advantage: we are one of the few countries that centralize information about commercial and tax transactions in the same document, which is official and auditable. Furthermore, each invoice contains more than 600 fields, many of them validated by the tax authorities themselves, concentrating relevant information about your business, product, supplier, and carrier. Therefore, beyond all the associated tax and procedural obligations, the invoice also offers a competitive advantage to those who know how to analyze it and create alerts about its fields.
“Technologies are crucial for ensuring compliance and efficiency in tax management, but also for transforming 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,” says Marcus Araújo, Head of Data & Principal Data Scientist at Arquivei, a platform responsible for managing tax documents for more than 140,000 companies.
The expert explains the importance of automating administrative processes in retail companies and comments on how to leverage tax data to benefit businesses.
Strategic tax management
Implementing an ERP system, a management software for retail companies, is crucial for efficient managerial control. This includes managing cost price, calculating profit margins, setting sales prices, controlling inventory, and issuing invoices. A process automation system integrates the various areas of the company, optimizing tasks and increasing operational and financial efficiency.
“In my experience, analyses with a broad strategic scope typically consume 80 to 90% of the time spent researching and consolidating information; that is, for every 10 hours of work, 2 hours are actually dedicated to analysis. Furthermore, it can take 3 to 4 versions before a decision is made. Having an ERP system integrated with all useful and organized information sources can therefore reclaim the time spent cleaning the data and reduce the time to decision-making, with up to five times the effectiveness and more informed analyses,” assesses Araújo.
Reconciling ERP systems with tax data automation is becoming essential for retailers to make informed and effective decisions. Extracting and analyzing tax data allows retailers to identify purchasing patterns, seasonality, and consumer preferences. This information is vital for optimizing inventory and planning marketing campaigns more accurately.
“In the retail market, different volumes of invoices are handled. There are companies that need to import a few hundred invoices monthly, and others that process 30 million invoices per month. A good example of this occurred when a retail giant needed to reduce errors in reconciling purchase orders with invoices from its suppliers. Delays and failures in this process were impacting different areas of the operation throughout Brazil. After automating the capture and structuring of invoices, in addition to mitigating errors, they also gained visibility into which suppliers are most and least compliant with their obligations. This visibility and control over suppliers allowed for the design of better policies 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 the correct parameterization of products and taxation, as well as more efficient inventory control.
Other factors include optimizing productivity and ensuring tax compliance. Integrating company processes and departments optimizes productivity, allowing for comprehensive analysis and more assertive decision-making.
Furthermore, automation allows for continuous monitoring of tax data, ensuring compliance with government regulations and mitigating the risk of penalties.
