The preparation for an implementation Project in Brasil is the most important step of the whole project.

Getting prepared for any upgrade, legal changes or new enhancements is also important when Brasil is part of these changes.

Planning well it will make a huge difference in your project and here are some hints on topics that you need to consider.

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SAP Projects in Brasil main characteristics

  • Requires more attention and an expert team with local resources due to the local fiscal and taxes requirements. An expert team will be at minimum MM, SD, FI, CO resources and people dedicated from the business side with deep knowledge on the company’s processes
  • Brazil has some unique business, legal and cultural changes that most of the people that are not used to work in Brazil will not understand at a first moment (maybe neither in a second or last time)
  • Researching and configuring the system to handle taxes correctly is a must. The understanding of the law it changes from company to company, depending on the kind of business that the company is running
  • Meeting all fiscal requirements that are continuously changing is mandatory. The invoices and legal reports issued are all electronically by the company and their partners. That means the government is able to cross check the information from both sides (your company and their partners) and make sure that the companies are not doing anything inappropriate on taxes collection, like tax evasion.

Preparing a Project for the challenge

  • Don’t take for granted that everyone in the company speaks English,  sometimes you will have to use multilingual resources to make the bridge between the business in Brasil and a core team overseas
  • Use local configuration resources from the beginning but keep them integrated with your core team. You will want to know what they are doing in the system and how to maintain this in the future and make sure there are no communication issues (advanced or fluent English proficiency)
  • Add local business resources to your team that can be dedicated and know deeply the business. Assign to the project  that resource that will not be missed in the department is a big mistake
  • Legal requirements in South America is changing quite often but an expert team will be able to handle that and SAP dedicates lot of effort to attend Brazil legal requirements before it become mandatory
  • Make sure you will have an external tax expert company to help when your local team is not 100% sure of something. If they are doing the same process in the same way over the past years, it doesn’t mean that is the correct way, they might be wrong and anytime is a good time to fix this
  • Be sure to keep your software up to date with patches issued by SAP for governmental changes

Taxes assessment

During the processes assessment, make sure taxes are very well assessed and it is clear to everybody. Items that are important to consider:

o   Operations and postings that are subject to tax

o   Forms in use

o   CFOPs in use

o   CST’s and all legal messages issued in the nota fiscal

o   Calculation Rules: Industrialization, Resale, Consumption, Assets

  • Exemptions
  • Tax Base Reductions
  • Tax Rate Exceptions
  • Conventions (Specific laws)
  • Retentions

o   Fiscal  / Legal Tax Books

o   Taxes accounting (Integrated with MM/FI and SD)

o   Taxes collection (SPED reports)

o   Magnetic Files

What does SAP not cover….?

It is important to know the system limitations too…

o   It prevents spend time in some thing that it is not supported standard

o   You can consider a development and plan it before you realize SAP will not do it standard

o   What are the consulting company and consultants BR localization knowledge?

o   What are the cost to develop these items that SAP will not cover by standard?

o   Are bolt-ons and interface the best choice instead developing in ABAP?

o   How trustable are the bolt-on and interface softwares?

o   The technology from this 3rd partner is compatible with SAP?

o   How flexible this 3rd partner software is to cover the legal requirements and dynamic changes

o   How much is the long term costs to maintain the software or handle this on SAP?

Conclusion

o   If you have the right resources (external and internal) and plenty time to complete the planning, gather requirements, assessments, then your project has a change to be a big success and no frustrations

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