New generation online invoicing and accounting platforms, such as Holded, Quipu or Billin, help you manage your invoices, expenses, payments and cash flow, but there is still a long way to go to comply with tax and commercial obligations.
Unless you are an expert in the field and have an industry-specific tool to do the work and adjustments that the platform cannot do, it is best to delegate this task to a company.
Just because a tool is a marvellous tool for invoicing, issuing delivery notes or managing projects does not mean that it knows how to calculate taxes correctly, even if the advertising says otherwise.
An increasingly complex environment
In the year 2023, 683 new regulations were approved in Spain at the state level. A total of 238,705 pages published in the BOE. To this must be added the regulatory production of the Autonomous Communities, another 291 regulations, with their 1,036,760 pages published.
«Corruptissima Re Publica, plurimae leges» (The more corrupt the state, the more numerous are its laws.) – trad. atrib. a Tacitus/Tácito
Modern computer programmes give a sense of automatism and ease that is incompatible with the legislative diarrhoea in this country. Spanish taxation is complex and constantly evolving.
- On invoicing alone, the AEAT itself publishes 4 deadline calculators, half a dozen help tools and a 365-page manual for standard VAT alone.
- The SII has 103 pages of frequently asked questions and a virtual assistant that often refers to contacting the AEAT in person. And new provisions are published every year for different models and taxes.
- How many platforms can calculate intra-Community VAT thresholds? The answer is: none.
- How do you assess triangular transactions in the EU? Many apps such as Shopify claim to do this automatically, but any tax professional will tell you that these calculations are not always correct.
There are numerous solutions on the market that promise to do taxes, but the reality is that they rarely work.
The utopia of “automatic” taxation
The market leader (Wolters Kluwer’s A3) is still an industry-specific application now partly made in COBOL, a company with 20,000 employees and 4.6 billion turnover that, even today, has not found a way to do taxes “automatically” and that its tool is just that, a tool for tax experts and accountants to use to do and file taxes.
Here ChatGPT has not yet arrived here and is still lacking.
If you are one of our clients, we will help you select a suitable platform or programme and we will take care of your taxes.
«The art of tax collection is to pluck the goose by getting the most feathers with the least amount of squawking.» — Jean Baptiste Colbert
Part of our job is to keep you from being fleeced, and if that proves impossible, to squawk with you.
Photo by Moritz Nie on Unsplash
Source: “Regulated production in 2023”. Regulated production. CEOE, April 2024. https://www.ceoe.es/es/publicaciones/empresa/la-produccion-normativa-en-2023.
