Education
Once you understand the mandate model and its likely impact, the practical questions become: who should be in the room, how early should this start, and how do you approach choosing a vendor without regretting it a year later?
A mandate response with no single accountable owner, or with the wrong functions missing from the room, is the most common cause of late surprises. Here's a working group that covers the ground without becoming unwieldy.
A senior Finance or Tax leader with the authority to commit budget and resolve cross-functional disagreements. Without this, the working group can identify problems but not always act on them quickly.
Owns the interpretation of the actual legal requirement, tracks scope and deadlines across entities, and is usually the one relationship-managing any external advisors.
Assesses what the current ERP/AP/AR systems can and can't do natively, and owns the technical relationship with whichever vendor or platform gets selected.
Reviews vendor contracts, data residency implications, and cross-border transfer questions — brought in from the start rather than at contract-signing, when it's too late to influence the shape of the deal.
Someone accountable for each affected country or business unit — particularly important in multinationals, where the same mandate can land differently depending on local entity structure and existing systems.
Runs the formal RFP process if one is needed, and ensures contract terms (SLAs, exit clauses, liability) get proper commercial scrutiny rather than being accepted as vendor boilerplate.
Keep this group to 6–8 people who meet regularly, with a wider circle (AP/AR team leads, key customers or vendors for testing, external advisors) consulted at specific milestones rather than in every meeting.
Grace periods and phased thresholds are common, and it's tempting to treat them as the real deadline. In practice, vendor lead times, testing cycles, and cross-functional coordination all take longer than expected — starting early is what actually determines whether go-live is calm or chaotic.
Determine which entities are actually in scope and from when, form the core working group above, and get an honest read on what your current ERP/AP/AR systems can and can't do without help.
This is usually the single most time-consuming phase — treat it as its own project with its own timeline, not a quick procurement exercise.
Master data cleansing in particular benefits from a long runway — it's rarely a quick fix once you actually look at the state of customer/vendor records.
Deliberately test failure paths — rejections, corrections, offline/contingency modes — not just the happy path where everything validates first time.
This is also when to brief customers and key vendors on what's changing, if the mandate affects how they'll receive or send invoices to you.
Rejection rates typically spike immediately after go-live as real-world data edge cases surface that testing didn't catch — budget attention for this rather than assuming go-live is the finish line.
Whether you need a full-service compliance platform, a specific country intermediary (a PAC, OSE, or Access Point), or just a module within your existing ERP, the same disciplined process pays off.
Country/format coverage needed, expected transaction volume, required integration method (API vs. portal), and budget range. Going to market without this tends to produce proposals that are hard to compare fairly.
Options usually span full-service global compliance platforms, country-specific intermediaries, and native ERP add-on modules — each with different trade-offs on coverage breadth versus depth and cost.
Format/country coverage, uptime and support SLAs (including support hours relative to your time zone), security certifications, integration effort required on your side, and — critically — their track record of keeping pace with regulatory changes in the countries you need.
A sandbox test with your own real (or realistic) data surfaces integration friction that a sales demo never will. Treat this as non-negotiable before signing, not an optional nice-to-have.
Data residency commitments, liability for errors or missed deadlines, minimum continuity periods if you switch providers, and clear exit/data-portability terms — get Legal and Procurement involved in this stage directly, not as a final rubber stamp.
If you operate in multiple markets, ask how the vendor's roadmap covers countries you don't need yet but might soon — switching providers again in two years is a real cost worth avoiding if a single relationship can reasonably grow with you.
Patterns worth watching for, based on how these programmes typically go wrong.
Enforcement holidays exist to ease the transition, not to signal there's no urgency — the underlying technical and process work still needs to happen on the original timeline.
The single most common cause of early rejections, and the easiest thing to deprioritise under time pressure — it rarely pays off to skip it.
When Finance, IT, and Legal each think someone else is driving, gaps surface late — usually right when there's no time left to fix them.
Rejections, corrections, and contingency/offline modes are exactly where real operational pain shows up — test these deliberately, not just the case where everything works first time.
A vendor or approach that works well in one country's model doesn't automatically fit another's — re-verify fit market by market rather than assuming.
Cost structures that look similar at low volume can diverge sharply at real production volume — always model pricing at your actual expected scale.