International business environment might surprise you if you are just beginning expansion and becoming multinational company.
If your headquarters is located in United States or Canada then you might may have opinion that such issues as sales and corporate income taxes is something straightforward and it doesn’t take a long time to be setup in your accounting system. Let’s take a look at the situation in Sao Paulo and across Brazil and talk about ERP selection and deployment. This paper does not pretend to be absolute advice. It is rather initial material for your homework:
1. Multinational company ERP architecture. Of course ideal situation when you are deploying the same application for all international subsidiaries. Very nice approach is to host it on SQL cluster somewhere in the headquarters and open to international users via Citrix, Microsoft Terminal Server or similar technologies. Additional recommendation is to create template which could be quickly cloned for new international branch when it opens the doors. Such architecture however dictates selection of brand name ERP package. The list is limited and includes SAP, Microsoft Dynamics or Oracle
2. SAP Business One is localized in Brazil. User interface could be switched from English to Brazilian Portuguese and back. This means that you as controller from US office can control foreign subsidiary on the level of documents and transactions. However let’s take a look at local legislation and practices
3. SPED or Public Digital Bookkeeping System. Since January 1st 2008 each corporate business is required to report electronically it’s AR, AP, GL and other transactions. Idea is probably very good as it makes every business transaction open to CPA, Lawyers and other related professionals communities and eliminates unfair competition or gray schemas. However as you may imagine SPED is quit challenging in its implementation on the level of accounting application. To give you some details SPED also has mandated chart of accounts with instructions how each type of transaction should be distributed on its accounts. Good news is that SAP B1 has SPED add-on available through ISV channel
4. Taxation. Here in the USA we do not expect tax setup to be an issue. However in Brazil it is common when consultants have to come through so-called ‘tax determination’ questionnaire and then manually enter rates and formulas for each product group based on your size, industry code, product type and shipping from and to regions. You may expect tax setup to take at least a week of fulltime consulting. Another estimation is about twenty percent of consulting hours in mid-size implementation
5. Competition to SAP BO. We would like to mention Microsoft Dynamics AX formerly known as Axapta. It is also localized by Microsoft Business Solutions and they have office in Sao Paulo. AX has add-on FBI (Fiscal Books Integration) which reports SPED documents to third party agent Soft Team. And then Soft Team reports to SPED servers on your behalf. We would also like to mention local package named Microsiga
6. Please call us 1-866-304-3265, 1-269-605-4904, help@efaru.com. We have local presence in Chicagoland, Southern California, Atlanta Georgia, 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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