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3. Case study:
Synergiefabrik

ICP for tax advisers

Taking as its basis IRISCapture Pro for Invoices, Essen-based synergiefabrik has developed a special invoice scanning solution incorporating Workflow for the German tax advisers’ market.

It is often not worthwhile for small and medium-sized businesses to take on their own bookkeeping staff, as the overall time spent on vouchers is within manageable limits. Nonetheless, transactions have to be recorded promptly and fully, if only because of the monthly duty to make sales tax returns. With the clients in question, this is the tax adviser’s task. So that the relevant data can be obtained, almost all German tax firms offer a day-to-day bookkeeping service.

Of course, the number of vouchers varies from client to client, which means that the tax firm can receive anything from a small folder to several files each month. At the moment, the standard practice in German tax firms is to accumulate paper vouchers. So far, even electronic archiving has only been implemented in tax firms in a rudimentary way.

For some time now, the manual work of data compilers in tax firms has been greatly complicated by German tax legislation. Thus, in 2005, § 14 of the income tax law (Umsatzsteuergesetz) added a list of mandatory invoice components that, if missing on invoices, prohibit the deduction of input tax. As a result, in addition to inputting, every accounts clerk must also conduct a statutory invoice check. However, because of the need to meet various deadlines, this is rarely possible in practice. As a result, the coming years will see more and more sales tax audits aimed at the repayment of wrongly deducted input tax together with interest claims by the tax authorities. That this will lead to massive upset between clients, the tax adviser, his staff, suppliers and the tax authorities is a foregone conclusion.

This is where synergiefabrik steps in. According to synergiefabrik, IRISCapture Pro for Invoices offers the ideal OCR basis for mapping the above-mentioned requirements in one software program.

In this respect, synergiefabrik distinguishes two possible extension stages. In the first, the vouchers are scanned in at the tax firm to be made available to staff electronically for reprocessing. In this way the files can be returned to the client after much less time. In the second, the clients do the scanning themselves and therefore only send the image files to the tax firm. In this way the client holds on to his vouchers and saves not only time but also postage and travel costs.

The processors in the tax firm process the vouchers at a monitor using an expanded IRISCapture Pro for Invoices booking template with a large number of fields:

All automatically recognised values of relevance to the invoice check are displayed. If fields are still missing, the user is conveniently led through the individual fields in order to conduct a final visual invoice check. If details are in fact missing on invoices, the user can now enter a status. When the data is exported to financial accounting, a letter is automatically generated to the client based on the statuses. This letter contains a copy of all vouchers that failed the invoice check with a request to the client to ask the suppliers in question to reissue these vouchers with appropriate corrections.

It is also possible to have vouchers returning from a supplier automatically pre-allocated to an account so that they only have to be processed once and are ready to be exported directly with complete booking data.

It is for this reason that the electronic archiving of vouchers is playing an ever greater role in tax firms. But it is not only the quest for automatically generated index fields that is in demand – full text indexing is what really matters here since the most frequent search for a voucher involves neither the invoice date nor the invoice number but the goods supplied. This is why the direct connection of IRISPDFServer 5.0 provides the ideal complement to ICP. The perfect extension stage is achieved in archiving if the client obtains direct access over the internet to his own vouchers.

All told, for tax advisers the introduction of ICP means not only a transformation of existing structures in tax firms but also genuine potential for rationalisation. On top of this, as a result of the direct connection of clients and resulting daily transmission of data, the adviser is now in a position to optimise every aspect of his clients from simple controlling tasks to the assumption of complete interim management. In particular, where a client is very innovative in his line of business but has only modest managerial abilities, the use of ICP could substantially increase the success of the client’s business in a targeted manner. This is because the tax firm has not only the data in its possession but also the managerial skills.

Rainer Ehrens

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