A global template designed once, then deployed country by country with the statutory, tax and e-invoicing work sequenced ahead of each go-live.
Illustrative. This is a walkthrough of how we run this kind of engagement, not an account of a specific client project. It carries no client and no results, because none are being claimed. Delivered work, with measured outcomes, is on the work pages.
A group trading in several countries with a legal entity in each. Finance runs on one system in some markets and something older in the rest, consolidation is assembled by hand after every close, and the intercompany position is argued about rather than posted. New markets are being opened faster than the finance systems absorb them, and at least one country has an e-invoicing obligation with a date attached to it.
Every country gets a requirement pass and an obligation pass, and they are different exercises. The requirement pass is what the business wants. The obligation pass is what the local statute, the tax authority and the auditor require, which is not negotiable and which sets the sequence. This is also where the group decides what a country is allowed to vary and who signs off a deviation, because a template without that rule is a template in name only.
What you get
The template is designed and built once, in a reference legal entity, against the group chart of accounts and dimension model. Intercompany, consolidation and the mechanics of the group's transfer pricing policy are designed here rather than treated as a reporting problem at the end, because retrofitting them across live entities is the expensive version of this work.
What you get
One country goes all the way through, including the parts most programmes defer: local statutory reports produced from the system, the indirect tax return generated rather than assembled, and the e-invoicing connection tested against the tax authority's own test facility where one exists. The first country is slow on purpose. It is the country that finds everything the template got wrong.
What you get
Countries follow in waves of two or three. Each wave is a shortened cycle: local design against the template, localisation build, local testing with local finance, migration, cutover. The runbook gets shorter each wave, and the honest measure of the template is how much shorter. If wave three is taking as long as wave one, the template is not a template and we say so rather than absorbing it.
What you get
The last waves run while the earlier countries are already closing on the new ledger. Group consolidation moves onto the platform, the first group close runs with us present, and the legacy ledgers are decommissioned deliberately rather than left running because nobody owned the decision.
What you get
Most are not, and a few genuinely are. The test is whether a deviation has a statutory citation behind it or a named executive sponsor willing to own the cost. Requirements with a legal basis go into the template as a country variant and are not argued about. Requirements that are habit go on the register with a price, and the sponsor decides. Without that rule the template dissolves into a set of country builds, which is the failure mode of this kind of programme.
This is why the obligation register is built in month one rather than discovered in the country's own wave. Where a mandate lands before its country's go-live, the choice is to pull that country forward or bridge the obligation on the system it is still running, and we will tell you which is cheaper. What we will not do is plan a cutover against a date set by a tax authority and hope the two meet.
Template versions are numbered and the change log records which entity is on which. Countries move up at planned points with a regression pass, rather than drifting until each one is effectively bespoke. The alternative, which is common, is a group that thinks it has one system and actually has nine.
Named local availability is agreed before a wave starts, not requested during it. A country signed off without its own controller in the room is a country that finds its statutory reporting problem after go-live, in a filing period, with a deadline.
Local statutory accounts, tax determination and digital reporting depend on how the ledger, the tax codes and the document numbering were set up in the first place. If they are left to a reporting phase, the answer is usually a rebuild of the configuration underneath. They are designed in the template and proven in the first country for that reason.
Other shapes
