Making Tax Digital (MTD), the HMRC initiative that requires UK businesses to submit their tax returns and payments online while also keeping digital records of their taxes, becomes mandatory from 1st April 2019 with businesses required to submit from a list of HMRC compliant software (of which NetSuite is one) or an API-enabled spreadsheet.

For many, this will be a significant change from their processes today, as not only do they manually re-key their VAT returns into HMRC’s online portal but they also have transactions in multiple ERP systems, separate commerce platforms or even spreadsheets.

NetSuite delivers functionality to support UK VAT registered businesses and provides a simple mechanism to help those businesses meet the mandatory VAT filing requirements. For existing NetSuite customers, the MTD features are available immediately at no additional cost and with no costly implementation required.

NetSuite customers are simply required to enable the International Tax Reports SuiteApp. Enabling this will allow HMRC-compatible MTD links, HMRC VAT filing capability and audit trails, meaning compliance can be supported almost instantly thanks to the powerful NetSuite tax engine.

MTD is the latest example of tax authorities across the world making rapid changes to taxation, ranging from enforcing economic entity registration, VAT charged on consumer location, digital reporting to electronic invoicing. All of this creates additional complexity in financial management and reporting for a vast majority of businesses – which is where NetSuite can assist.

NetSuite is designed to help global enterprises meet their complex tax compliance and reporting requirements. It supports more than 100 countries, delivering automatic feature updates in line with changes to local tax requirements, meaning that customers are seamlessly compliant.

Through several VAT rate changes (examples include three UK rate changes from 2009 to 2011, and in Spain the obligation to file in almost “real time” basis with SII), NetSuite has demonstrated its ability to respond quickly to changing business conditions in near real-time and then communicate a single, best-practice message directly to customers via the cloud-based platform. Customers continue to enjoy tax compliance without needing teams to monitor compliance changes, boosting productivity and maintaining focus on the growth opportunities before them.