In my previous essay, we covered the main concerns SAP accounts have as the Mexican government continues to promote and implement the use of CFDI. I felt it was important to go into further detail about the various problems that users and managers of Procurement and Accounts Payable may encounter.
As already mentioned, 90% of Mexican invoices presently fall under the legacy CFD regime, which uses a totally different XML format and business procedure. And today, a lot of businesses will use manual data entry to adhere to the required incoming validations. Keep in mind that the government mandated on December 28, 2012, that the certified XML structure of the CFDI be archived for a minimum of five years. Additionally, auditors will use this XML as the only source of truth for examining VAT tax inconsistencies. The issue is that an organisation may experience a double or triple increase in the volume of incoming CFDI. Automation is going to be required because manual methods won’t be able to handle the additional workload. Here are some suggestions for AP managers or shared service managers who are considering Mexico eInvoicing in the near future.
- Make sure you are in compliance with the XML archiving and validation laws as of today, December 28, 2012. You must ensure compliance regardless of whether you receive CBB, CFD, or CFDI invoices because many businesses are not doing this procedure correctly.
- Recognize how much CFD versus CFDI you are currently receiving and will be receiving as the government changes.
- Be aware of how you are demonstrating the inbound document validations because many Mexican PACs still only do extremely minimal validations that fall short of all standards.
- Consider “okay to pay” protocols instead of only “okay to deduct,” which is the government’s certification of the comprobante, as they will ultimately streamline your inbound receiving and payables process. There are things you must do and things you can do to streamline your business processes in response to government regulations.
- The majority of Shared Services or SAP end customers are migrating to single instances or regional instances of the ERP system; you need to know the effects of the changes on your AP process. Speak with providers who specialise in Latin America eInvoicing and particularly the SAP system.