An Overview of Sabrix Solution

An Overview of Sabrix Solution

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An Overview of Sabrix Solution

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 An Overview of Sabrix Solution

Table of Contents

Introduction to Sabrix Solution:

Sabrix is a leading provider of transaction tax management for companies of

all sizes. Sabrix enables finance, tax, and IT professionals to achieve
accurate, timely, cost-effective compliance for sales tax, use tax, Value
Added Tax (VAT), excise tax and industry-specific taxes and fees.

The Sabrix Solution is transaction tax management software which is a highly

scalable and reliable service for all business applications that need
consolidated tax determination, calculation and recording for an enterprise. It
is a three-tier application built on industry standard J2EE technology and
state-of-the-art object oriented design principles. It is designed to optimize
interoperability, manageability, performance, reliability and security.

Challenges to tax calculation:

• Tax consolidation and visibility has become a challenge since tax
professionals and systems are distributed world-wide.

• Due to Companies rapid expansion into new markets and increased

channels of distribution, there is a need for a central audit and compliance
database.

• There is a need for a truly global solution which can address global business
practices.

• There is a need to provide a real-time, global tax calculation for each and
every transaction.

How Sabrix can help in facing the challenges?

• Sabrix responds quickly in support of all business, system changes globally.

• Sabrix simplifies and improves the tax automation processes with globally
distributed management and control.

• Sabrix achieves global tax visibility.

• Sabrix reduces costs.

Business Benefits from Sabrix:

• Tax professionals now have the ability to rapidly implement and control the
tax changes in support of business and system changes.

• Companies can get ability and control over all transaction tax across the
world.

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• Companies can able to ensure no underpayments, overpayments, or

penalties will be incurred with reduced risk and exposure.

• Companies get improved tax planning and optimization.

• Companies get increased efficiency and save money by reducing

transaction tax management costs and the IT group is no longer burdened
with tax policy, rules and content maintenance.

For each transaction, the system:

•Receives transaction information from the business systems (Ex: Oracle

EBS), in batch or real-time.

•Determines which taxes apply to each transaction, the amount of tax, and
to whom it is owed.

•Returns this data back to the calling application. (Ex: Oracle EBS)

•Stores the data in a centralized database using common elements and

definitions. From this database, we can run standard and customized reports
across the enterprise using the SabrixReports module, resulting in an audit
trail that can be easily maintained.

The Sabrix Solution directly supports - US Sales and Use tax, as well as VAT
and other taxes in Europe, Canada, Latin America, and many other regions.

Standard Functionalities Provided by Sabrix

The Sabrix Solution is capable of providing all U.S. and international standard
tax determination, calculation and recording.

Sabrix Solution standard product functionality includes:

1. Standard Rates, Rules, Zones, Authorities – U.S. and International
Sabrix’ Sales and Use Tax Manager includes the United States and Canada rates,
rules, zones, and authorities. Sabrix VAT Manager includes support for over 130
international countries.

2. Purchase Transaction Taxation

The Sabrix Solution determines, calculates and validates transaction taxes for all
business applications and processes throughout the requisition-to-payment cycle.
Validation of vendor charged taxes on accounts payable invoices and the
determination and recording of consumers use tax for accrual purposes is
performed.

3. Special Complex Taxation

The Sabrix Solution addresses cross border, maximum taxes, triangular sales, and
all other complex U.S. and International tax and accounting requirements.

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4. Product Exemptions
Sabrix includes U.S. Product Taxability data with Sales and Use Tax Manager, and
the Sabrix VAT Global Tax Manager includes complete International product
taxability for more than 140 countries. Sabrix Product Taxability works in
conjunction with a company’s own configured products and product category
exceptions to flexibly accommodate all special product taxability needs.

Configurable Functionalities Provided by Sabrix

Tax professionals are empowered to quickly and easily configure the Sabrix
Solution to meet their company’s special tax and organizational
requirements. The configurable functionality of the Sabrix Solution includes:
1. Configuring Corporate Structure
As your business structure changes, your tax team can re-configure your corporate
structure and registrations, define new shipping locations, and identify established
authorities quickly and effortlessly.

Company Structure: Tax professionals can configure a company

structure that facilitates the sharing of data and generation of accurate,
timely reports enterprise-wide. Depending on your specific needs, your
company can be configured as a single entity or as a hierarchical
company with subsidiaries, divisions and business units. Company tax
defaults and preferences previously established are immediately shared
with the new company or easily modified.

Established Authorities: Tax professionals can configure the locations

in which your company is established and has tax reporting obligations.
Your company may be established in an authority, it may be registered
with an authority, or a combination of both.

Registrations: Tax professionals would manage registration information.

The Sabrix Solution delivers warning messages when international
shipments are exceeding thresholds in countries where your company has
no registration so that these situations are proactively corrected before
they become an issue.

Locations: Tax professionals assign shortened location names for those

locations you ship from, ship to, and receive or accept orders from most
frequently

2. Custom Product Exceptions

Tax professionals can make accommodations for unique company product
exceptions. By default, Sabrix calculates tax using standard rates and exemptions,
however, company unique product exceptions can be configured and associated with
custom defined rules and rates.

3. Exemption Certificate Management

Manage both your own exemption certificates and your customers’ exemption
certificates and use them effectively in real-time. Exemptions can be defined as full
or partial, be capped at a maximum amount, apply to a single transaction or all

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transactions meeting certain criteria, and be controlled by effective dates. The

Sabrix Solution can also automatically create certificates for transactions that meet
certain predefined criteria.

4. Custom Rates and Rules

Tax rules for each jurisdiction can be easily modified to accommodate special tax
situations such as exemptions on specific products or custom rates negotiated with
an authority.

5. TransEditors
TransEditors allow the tax professionals to accommodate complex tax situations.
Perhaps all transactions with a particular jobcode are not taxable by the county –
the power of transaction editors accommodates tax situations such as this without
requiring special programming by your IT department or consultants.

Additional Functionalities provided by Sabrix

1. The Sabrix Workbench: Tax Planning, Modeling, and Testing

Once the Sabrix Application Suite tax configuration is complete, tax
professionals can use the Sabrix Solution Workbench to model and test
sample transactions to understand tax implications and see the impact of
new tax configurations. This testing tool enables fast implementation and
ongoing management of transaction taxes. Scenarios can be run once or
saved to be run multiple times to ensure that changes are implemented
accurately. Transaction tax modeling also empowers tax professionals in M&A
activities, sourcing, and distribution strategies.

2. Consolidated Reporting
The Sabrix Solution includes standard U.S. and international transaction tax
reports plus custom reporting capabilities. Additionally, a powerful “generate
Excel” option is provided for report output which automatically generates a
fully-formatted excel spreadsheet. Tax professionals focused on audits and
other reconciliation tasks can generate a variety of standard and
customizable reports from the single transaction tax database, bypassing the
need for manual reconciliation or IT involvement.

3. The Financial Dashboard

Specifically designed for a company’s tax executives, the Financial Dashboard
provides an on demand snapshot of a company’s tax obligations globally.

4. Compliance and Returns

The Sabrix Solution provides companies with a centralized transaction tax
management system and a single audit database making time consuming
data gathering, issues with tax data consistency, and tedious consolidation,
all problems of the past. The Sabrix Solution enterprise tax management has
been seamlessly integrated with RIA’s industry-leading tax compliance
software, InSource. The integration between Sabrix and InSource Sales &
Use Tax software provides tax professionals in the U.S the most
comprehensive and innovative tax automation and compliance solution
available. The Sabrix Solution also has full data extract capabilities and can
interface with any returns processing solution.

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Technology Platform Overview

The Sabrix Solution’s Enterprise Technology Platform consists of:

•The Database Tier: a relational database that stores the transaction tax
data and application metadata. The database can be easily modified to create
custom rules, rates, products, and other information specific to the enterprise
- all without the need for specialized programming or API work.

•The Middle Tier: A J2EE 1.5-compliant Application Server, including

the Sabrix Transaction Logic Engine. The engine ensures that, for any
given transaction, customers pay the right tax to the right authority. A
unique, object-oriented technology replaces the standard matrix-oriented
approach, leading to faster and more accurate calculations.

•XML and HTML: XML is used as the data interchange format to interface to
business systems, and HTML is used for tax professionals to access the
Sabrix Solution’s Tax Control Panel.

The Relational Database in Sabrix

The Sabrix Solution is the industry’s only global tax solution to use a single
relational database to store all tax metadata, transaction data, and
calculation results for a company - enterprise-wide.

Storing all tax metadata in the database, rather than hard-coding rules,
rates, and other tax data in the tax application or business-to-tax application
API enables the following:

•Tax professionals can directly update The Sabrix Solution’s

special tax rates, rules, exceptions, exemptions, company structure,
etc. using the system’s flexible, Web-based user interface. The tax
professionals no longer need to write specifications and work through
the IT department or a third-party vendor to manage transaction tax
determination.

•A single point of change means tax and data consistency:

altering the database once makes a change available to all calling
business applications providing tax data consistency. Other tax "point
solutions" require changes be made to each system leading to
inconsistencies, duplication of tax and IT effort, and tax
management/audit issues.

•Faster lookups: the object-oriented structure of the data allows

for more efficient, quicker access of only the data that applies to the
current transaction. Other tax solutions’ matrix-based lookups are
slower and more prone to data corruption.

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Storing transaction data and calculation results in a single database also

enables consolidated, real-time reporting and a complete historical audit trail
that can be easily accessed and reported against.

The Sabrix Universal Tax Engine

The Sabrix Universal Tax Engine evaluates an invoice for its taxability,
determines the taxing jurisdictions, and then calculates the correct tax for
each.

•Invoices are evaluated based on Ship From, Ship To, and other locations
to determine taxability. Because it is a centralized system, worldwide data
can be considered in every transaction. Furthermore, there is no need for
tax clerks to specify the taxability of an invoice.

•Exemption certificates are automatically applied if the invoice matches

the appropriate criteria. You can even set auto-creation of certificates for
customers if certain criteria are met.

•The Sabrix Universal Tax Engine uses an exceptions-based lookup

scheme. While other tax solutions need to store and maintain rates for
every jurisdiction down to the lowest level, the Sabrix Solution only
maintains those exceptions to standard rates. This decreases the amount of
data that needs to be maintained (reducing the chance of data error or
corruption) and speeds rate lookups.

•The Engine uses an object-oriented approach rather than a single, static

rate table or matrix. It intelligently routes transactions only to the
applications needed to calculate tax for the given invoice, ignoring all
irrelevant data. Other solutions’ if-else logic can lead to incorrect or
bounced tax calculations given an error in the tax rate table; the Sabrix
Solution would only generate an error in the unlikely event that a specific
tax rate for a given invoice’s jurisdiction was incorrect.

Sabrix Connections

The Sabrix Solution enterprise transaction tax management software is a

centralized taxing service for all business applications that need tax
determination, calculation and recording. The Sabrix Solution connects to
business applications by using a Sabrix Connection; a defined XML interface
over standard HTTP protocols (http/https). Specific Sabrix Connection
products are available to enable direct connections with the following
business systems:

• Oracle Sales (Receivables/Order Management)

• Oracle Purchases (Payables/Purchasing)

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• SAP

In addition, the Sabrix Connection Toolkit for Java enables interfaces to

other business applications.

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Program Interfaces

Sabrix Connections handle tax calculation requests from client applications.

The Sabrix Solution has been designed to successfully integrate with Oracle,
SAP, legacy, and all other business applications that require the
determination of transaction taxes. The Sabrix Connections for Oracle Sales
and Oracle Purchasing are two examples of connections that enable Sabrix
Solution integration with specific source systems.

The Sabrix Data Interchange facilitates the transfer of data, such as

customer, exemption certificate, and other company-specific information,
between Sabrix Solution instances and between the Sabrix Solution and other
data sources.

The Universal Relation View enables simplified access to the audit

database from which data can be extracted for custom reports.

Sabrix Connection Process Flow

Regardless of the calling business application, each connection follows the

five steps:

Event Trigger - each point along the transaction flow where tax is required.
These are provided for in most ERP systems, and handle most standard and
special cases.
Data Element Aggregation - retrieve all data elements required to
determine tax. This is primarily driven by business requirements.
Format and Transmit - construct the XML structure and send to Sabrix
Solution. This includes mapping to the appropriate Sabrix Solution XML
elements, creating the appropriate HTTP message for either synchronous
(single invoice) or batch transmission, and posting the message to the
correct URL.
Receive and Parse - retrieve the return XML and parse the output. The
message is passed in to Sabrix over HTTP and can then be parsed and
mapped to the appropriate business application elements.
Post Results - place the results of the tax calculation back into the
application.

Underlying Technologies in Sabrix Solution

The Sabrix Solution leverages the following three underlying technologies:

•XML is the standard for structured data interchange.

XML, the eXtensible Markup Language, is the standard for structured data
interchange. Sabrix uses XML version 1.0 as its data interchange format
between the Sabrix Solution and the calling ERP systems.

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•J2EE is the Java platform on which the Sabrix Solution is build.

The Enterprise Technology Platform is based on the Java 2 Enterprise Edition
(J2EE) architecture.

•Application servers enable access from anywhere in your enterprise via the
internet.
The Sabrix Solution is built to make use of standard Internet Protocols. You
can use the Microsoft Internet Explorer Web Browser to access the system
from anywhere in your enterprise.

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Reference:
Sabrix Solutions User Guide

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