In this guide 6 sections
Make the vendor demonstrate each claim. Request a dated tax table and an invoice that keeps its original amount and rate source. Watch your own admin add a country. Ask for a right-to-left printout and the named location of data and backups. A currency dropdown proves nothing.
How are tax rates stored and changed?
Ask to see the tax table itself. A sound package keeps each rate as a row with a start date, an end date and a jurisdiction. An invoice raised in March then still shows the March rate when someone reopens it in December. A weaker one keeps a single rate in a settings screen.
Change a rate during the demo. Watch whether old documents move. If a credit note for an old sale picks up today’s rate, the ledger will disagree with the filed return.
Last check. Who edits the table, and is the edit logged?
- Start date and end date on every rate row
- Separate rates per country, state or region
- Rate lookup by document date, not today’s date
- Change log showing who edited a rate and when
- Exemption and zero-rate codes kept apart from rates
What does a foreign currency invoice keep?
Open an invoice raised in euros for a company that reports in pounds. You want to see four things on the record: the original amount, the rate used, where that rate came from and the reporting value. If any of them is missing, nobody can rebuild the entry later.
Ask what happens on payment. The package should post the realised difference to its own account when the bank receipt lands at another rate. Ask also about period-end revaluation of open receivables, because a ledger that never revalues drifts away from the real balance.
Finally, ask about rounding. Yen has no minor unit and the Kuwaiti dinar has three, so one rounding rule for every currency will quietly misstate totals.
- Original amount and currency stored beside the converted value
- Rate source and rate date shown on the record
- Realised and unrealised differences posted separately
- Rounding set per currency, not once for the whole system
Who can add a country, and how long does it take?
Many vendors list twenty countries and mean twenty rows in a dropdown. Ask what a country actually contains: a tax table, a numbering series, a document template, date and number formats, a language pack and a chart of accounts mapping.
Then ask who builds the twenty-first. If the answer is a vendor ticket and a quarter’s wait, your expansion plan now depends on their roadmap. If your own administrator can copy a profile, edit it and test it, you stay in control.
Ask for an example of a country added after go-live. A vendor with a real answer will name the steps and the person who did them.
How are printed documents tested for other languages?
Screens are easy. Paper breaks. Ask the vendor to print an invoice in Arabic or Hebrew. Check that the columns mirror and the totals stay on the correct side of the page. Then ask for German or Finnish, where long compound words push a line item off its cell.
Request the PDF, not a screenshot. Open it on your own machine and look for clipped text, missing glyphs and the wrong paper size. Letter and A4 are not interchangeable.
Ask how they test this before each release. A real answer names a set of sample documents, not a promise.
- Right-to-left layout on invoice and statement
- Long words wrapping inside item description cells
- Non-Latin names and addresses printing without boxes
- A4 and Letter page sizes per region
Where do data and backups sit, and who can see them?
Some countries expect certain records to stay inside their borders, and some customers ask the same in contracts. Ask which data centre holds your database, which one holds the backups and whether you can pick the region per entity. Get the answer in writing, with the supplier’s own sub-processors listed.
Next, ask about access. Can a regional manager in Lagos see only the Lagos ledger? Can support staff at the vendor read your tables, and is that logged?
Take the full list into a second meeting with your tax adviser. Score each vendor on the answers shown live and drop anyone who only answered in slides.
Vendor question scorecard
A single scorecard with one row per question and a column each for vendor name, answer shown live, answer given only in words and follow-up owner. Rows are grouped under tax tables, currency records, new countries, printed documents and data location, with a final line for the tax adviser’s sign-off.
Open a blank worksheet to printQuestions owners ask
Is a long country list a good sign?
Not by itself. A long list can mean twenty dropdown entries with no dated tax rules behind them. Ask for one country in full, from tax table to printed invoice, and judge the list by that.
Should my tax adviser join the demo?
Yes, for the tax table and invoice parts. They will spot a missing legal line or a wrong rate date faster than a finance team can. Software supports compliance but does not replace their advice.
What if the vendor says new countries are on the roadmap?
Treat roadmap items as absent. Ask what you can configure today and what needs vendor work, then get delivery terms for the rest in the contract.
How many vendors should get these questions?
Send them to every shortlisted vendor in the same form, so answers compare cleanly. Three is usually enough to show real differences.