The Compliance Network implementation process includes the following high-level phases:

The following roles interact with each other during the Compliance Network implementation process:

Professional Services (PS)

The PS team is responsible for advising the customer and guiding the Compliance Network solution for the customer. To start the implementation, PS meets with the customer to explain the Sovos implementation process.

Sales Engineers (SE)

SEs talk with the customer before they buy the Compliance Network solution to identify the customer's needs. Each SE provides a documented list of customer requirements to the PS implementation team. SEs advise customers to use the Sovos Canonical Invoice (SCI), which follows the UBL standard format. Partners and PS teams can independently explore SCI field mappings and country-specific requirements using SCI Tools, without needing a Sovos representative to provide a mapping file.

Customers

Customers are responsible for the overall implementation within their environment and must work closely with Sovos or our partners to ensure success. For a successful implementation, the customer must assign a project manager to monitor and manage the project. This liaison helps to make sure that customer needs are met and involves additional customer team members throughout the process to validate requirements, perform testing, and provide feedback.

This section provides guidance on the initial planning and preparation required for designing a solution, including considerations for country support, organizational structure, user roles, and integration with ERPs or other platforms.

Consider the following when designing the solution:

• What countries does the customer need to support? Read about Country mandates and prerequisites .

• What organization, company, users, and roles will be needed initially?

• What ERPs or other platforms will Compliance Network need to integrate?

• How will you map the customer data to the Sovos products? Learn about mapping the SBD and SCI.

The design of an organization is one of the most important planning considerations when starting a new implementation and can greatly impact the business's experience with Sovos products.

Sovos accounts offer several levels of hierarchy and flexible configuration for businesses of all sizes and complexity. In general, a business should have one organization to centralize transactional data, usage, and billing data. Underneath the organization, a business must create sub-organizations, called companies, to create a more granular level of setup at the tax ID level.

Workspace

A workspace is the highest level account object and is used only for Sovos partners. A workspace has unique functionalities for partners, such as the ability to manage branding and aggregated usage reporting for billing.

Organization

An organization is the equivalent of an account. For direct client (non-partner) accounts, one contracting entity should have one organization in Compliance Network. This is because product and subscription details are assigned to an organization and transactional usage is measured at the organization level.

Sovos automatically generates an ID for each organization to uniquely identify the account. This ID is different from the organization's name. The Sovos implementation team is responsible for creating the organizations for direct customers. Partners can also create organizations,as explained in Create an organization.

Company

Each organization can have one or more companies. You can create different companies in the system to represent different tax IDs or business units — as long as each company has a unique tax ID.

By default, a company will inherit the products assigned to the organization.

To learn how to create a company in either the admin UI or the API, see Add companies to your organization.

GLN

France only. GLNs are unique, standard identifiers that identify parties (legal entities, like corporations, and organizational subdivisions or departments) and locations. A company may be associated with zero or more Global Location Numbers (GLN)s.

GLNs can be used in barcodes, RFID, and EDI documents. Using GLNs can help streamline communication, increase efficiency and interoperability, and save time on documentation.

Users

Users are anyone invited to the organization or workspace, and can be given access to different features or companies.

Role

Standard and custom user roles grant or restrict access to product functions and data, with each user receiving one role. Sovos offers three standard roles:

Portal_Admin

A portal admin can perform actions, access historical documents, see configurations, and add and delete users. They can also see and download processed invoices.

Portal_User

A portal user can perform actions, access historical documents, and see and download processed invoices.

Portal_User_Read

A read-only user can see and download processed invoices.

API Team

You can create API teams to organize users and services across an organization. API teams can also be used to manage API keys for services, so if a user leaves an organization and is deleted from the account, the service ID will remain. This ensures that your application or service stays up and running.

API Keys

An API key is a code used to identify and authenticate an account when sending an API request. An organization needs at least one API key for a sandbox environment and one API key for the production environment. An API key can be assigned to a user or to an API team. Sovos recommends that you set up an API team before requesting your API key so that multiple users can manage the same API key.

Products

The commercial identifier of the product, along with subscription level. Each country and type of process has a unique product key, so a country might have multiple products.

Every country has specific tax and compliance regulations that have to be configured for successful implementation.

As a general process, country-specific configuration involves the following steps:

1. Identify the prerequisites and comply with them.

2. Add at least one product.

3. Register with any required tax authorities.

4. Set up credentials.

5. Perform additional setup as needed.

For detailed information about country prerequisites and configuration details, see the appropriate country setup guide. Countries that use the PEPPOL framework have additional requirements to follow.