SAP Customers Now Have an On-demand SAP Nota Fiscal Service to Support Brazil CTe

For readers interested in Brazil's CTe, you may find this announcement of interest.  Managed Service offering for SAP ERP in Brazil now supports the Conhecimento de Transporte (CTe) for transportation invoice validations

Invoiceware International extends their SAP ERP Compliance Dashboards for Brazil to support the Conhecimento de Transporte which was made mandatory by the Brazilian government in December 2011. The legislation announces five waves of compliance for different modes of transportation with the first compliance requirements starting September 1, 2012.  

Invoiceware International’s service fully supports all of Brazil’s electronic invoicing mandates on a single platform: including Nota Fiscal Eletronica (NF-e), both outbound and inbound processing for physical goods, Nota Fiscal Eletronica de Serviços (NFE-s), for services invoices in over 120 cities, and now the CT-e for transportation invoices.

Invoiceware International’s SAP ERP Compliance Dashboards for Brazil include:

• Compliance: Satisfies SEFAZ CT-e mandates for validation, archive and fiscal posting to your system of record
• Lower Freight Costs: Track your spending on transportation invoices for discrepancies and eliminate duplicate invoices and payments.  Automatic matching against Transportation Management Systems or blanket PO.
• Less Labor, Faster Processing:  Automatic reconciliation of inbound NF-e for acknowledged and pre-approved payment processing;

“The addition of the CTe Compliance Dashboards for SAP ERP rounds out our rapid deployment templates for Brazil Nota Fiscal compliance, said Scott Lewin, CEO, Invoiceware International.  “Organizations now have a single on-demand service that addresses all of the Brazilian regulations now and in the future, shortens implementations, and provides 24x7 local language support.”   

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Kevin Benedict, EDI and e-Invoicing Veteran, Consultant, Speaker and Writer

Follow me on Twitter @b2b_benedict

Join the SAP EDI and e-Invoicing group on Linkedin

Full Disclosure: I am an independent consultant and blogger. I work with and have worked with many of the companies mentioned in my articles.

SAP Nota Fiscal 2012 - New Brazil Mandate for Transportation Invoices

As expected, Brazil continues to add and update their Nota Fiscal legislation.  In this article I want to discuss developments around Transportation Invoices, as these will be mandated starting in September 2012.  

The Transporation Invoice, also known as the Conhecimento de Transporte (CT-e for short) was added to the legislation as a mandatory electronic document based on the 169th meeting of the Conselho Nacional de Política Fazendária – CONFAZ held on December 11, 2011. In the following section I summarize some of the common questions companies are asking.

What is the CT-e?

Brazil Transportation Document  – is issued and stored electronically in order to document the provision of transport services, whose legal validity is guaranteed by the issuer’s digital signature and authorization of use provided by the tax administration. Examples of use would be a Waybill (model 10) or an Invoice for Transportation Service (model 7 when transporting cargo).

What are the dates for compliance?

September 1, 2012 is the initial deadline with others following in December of 2012. There are waves of compliance defined by the government which are listed in the link to the general announcement.

 www.fazenda.gov.br/confaz/confaz/ajustes.  This link is in Portuguese, I am sorry if you can't read it!    Your web browser should be able to give you a basic translation of the material. This announcement also lists further timelines as well as a list of transportation organizations that are specifically called out in Annex One for compliance.

Are there benefits to our organization that we should consider along with the mandate?

There are definitely benefits to an SAP user, beyond just becoming compliant.  For example, we are seeing companies tackle the CT-e early and capitalize on the business processes which are accelerated due to the electronic requirement.  For example:

• Lower Freight Costs: Track your spending on transportation invoices for discrepancies and eliminate duplicate invoices and payments.  You can automatically match the electronic invoice against Transportation Management Systems or blanket PO.
• Less Labor, Faster Processing:  Automatic reconciliation of inbound NF-e for acknowledged and pre-approved payment processing. 

What is the key take away?  Ensure your back-end solutions have the ability to validate the CT-e and work with your freight forwarding and 3PL partners to understand the timeframes that they will transition to the CT-e.

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Kevin Benedict, EDI and e-Invoicing Veteran, Consultant, Speaker and Writer

Follow me on Twitter @b2b_benedict

Join the SAP EDI and e-Invoicing group on Linkedin

Full Disclosure: I am an independent consultant and blogger. I work with and have worked with many of the companies mentioned in my articles.

Mexico SAT e-Invoicing 2012 Changes

For readers doing business in Mexico, these e-invoicing changes for 2012 will be important for you to understand.  If you would like more information on these changes you can find some good resources including whitepapers and webinars here.

Here are some of the important changes that I noted:

• Shipping Requirement: new requirement that all deliveries within Mexico must have the Comprobante (and UUID) as part of the documentation accompanying the truck for delivery.  Otherwise the truck and its goods can be impounded with fines demanded before release. This is a significant change for customers that do not have their logistics and invoicing processes linked together today. Contingency processing becomes a requirement much like it does in Brazil, so that your organization can ship even if the SAT systems go down.
• Paper: companies can continue to use paper as long as their annual revenue is less than 2,000,000 pesos. If annual revenue greater than this, then they must use electronic CFDI process.  Amount of each individual invoice no longer matters.
• Account Number:  emisor are expected to know and report the last 4 digits of the account numbers that their customers use for payment.  The SAT is researching how to implement this and may try strategies like using “special generic numbers” for those cases when emisor does not know in advance.
• Fiscal Address: the street and address will no longer be required, but the country, state and postal code still will.
• Installment Payments:  For installment payments, the emisor must send an invoice for each payment, plus an “informational” invoice to document the entire amount.  All invoices should be signed and sealed, and the UUID of the informational invoice (along with the date and total amount) should be referenced on each payment message.  (SAT needs to define how to tag or mark the informational invoice so that taxes are not double counted, but current thinking is that the “first” invoice transmitted will be considered the informational message. Also, since each “child” payment message will contain the reference numbers of the original parent invoice, they should be able to identify this way).

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Kevin Benedict, EDI and e-Invoicing Veteran, Consultant, Speaker and Writer

Follow me on Twitter @b2b_benedict

Join the SAP EDI and e-Invoicing group on Linkedin

Full Disclosure: I am an independent consultant and blogger. I work with and have worked with many of the companies mentioned in my articles.

RFID, e-Invoicing and Brazil's Nota Fiscal Eletrônica

I read an interesting article today by Alexandre Carvalho on SCN (SAP's Community Network) regarding RFID and Brazil's Nota Fiscal Eletronica. He described a government sponsored project that uses RFID in support of Nota Fiscal Eletronica.  Here are the details:

In August 2009, the Brazilian Government created the Brasil-ID project that uses RFID to automate the collection of data.  They will  identify, track and  authenticate products when they are in transit...the RFID will reduce the costs of insurance, and enhance the storage, distribution and logistics. For the Government, it will provide better control manufacturing, commercialization, goods transit and finally, the cost reduction and geo physical analysis for a product sales.  They will be rolling this pilot project out to over 80 companies in 2012 to support Brazil's e-invoicing requirements.  RFID will be used to automate the tracking and reporting of the goods.

I have been talking to the folks at Invoiceware about the latest requirements to be compliant with Nota Fiscal Eletronica, and I am glad I am not the one doing it.  I can see perhaps creating an in-house solution to support these requirements if all of your business was with one country, but most of the companies I talk to are supporting many Latin American countries, and there are different requirements for each.

As being compliant with all of these e-Invoicing requirements is NOT my core business, I would rather off-load the technical/IT requirements to a cloud based e-Invoicing service.

What are your thoughts?

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Kevin Benedict, EDI and e-Invoicing Veteran, Consultant, Speaker and Writer

Follow me on Twitter @b2b_benedict

Join the SAP EDI and e-Invoicing group on Linkedin

Full Disclosure: I am an independent consultant and blogger. I work with and have worked with many of the companies mentioned in my articles.

Supporting the Mexico CFD v3.2 e-Invoicing Changes in 2012

I came across this article last week on the new regulations from Mexico's Servicio de Aministracion Tributaria (SAT) that may be of interest to companies doing business in Mexico.  The new compliance mandates are listed below.

Invoiceware International extends their electronic invoicing capability to support the newly announced regulations by Mexico's Servicio de Aministracion Tributaria (SAT). These new mandates are scheduled to take affect for all companies in July 2012 leaving only a few months for companies to configure their business processes and ERP systems.

The new compliance mandates being instituted for July 2012 in Mexico includes:
•    Shipping Requirement: Requires that all deliveries within Mexico must have the Comprobante (and UUID, a 32-character code assigned by the SAT) as part of the documentation accompanying the truck for delivery. Otherwise the truck and its goods can be impounded with fines demanded before release. This is a significant change for customers that do not have their logistics and invoicing processes linked together today.
• Installment Payments: For installment payments, the emisor must send an invoice for each payment, plus an "informational" invoice to document the entire amount. All invoices should be signed and sealed, and the UUID of the informational invoice (along with the date and total amount) should be referenced on each payment message.

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Kevin Benedict, EDI and e-Invoicing Veteran, Consultant, Speaker and Writer

Follow me on Twitter @b2b_benedict

Join the SAP EDI and e-Invoicing group on Linkedin

Full Disclosure: I am an independent consultant and blogger. I work with and have worked with many of the companies mentioned in my articles.