Every invoice a Spanish company issues or receives has four working days to reach the Tax Agency. At Daimler Truck that means five companies, each with its own certificate, its own source system and its own way of classifying taxes. And nobody in finance types them in.
Five companies, five ways of doing the same thing
The Tax Agency’s Immediate Supply of Information (SII) requires every invoice, issued or received, to be filed within a few days with the right data. In a group like Daimler Truck that is not one process, it is several. Each company has its own tax codes and its own rules, and doing it by hand, invoice by invoice, tied up the finance team. Any absence delayed the filings.
We started with one
We automated the first company using the tax rules the accounting owner already kept in their own spreadsheet. We didn’t ask them to change how they worked, we turned it into a robot.
It worked, and the group kept asking for the next one. Then came a second company, Daimler Truck Financial Services, another group company and Daimler Buses.
One engine, not five robots
We didn’t build five different solutions. We built one engine and deploy it once per company and per invoice direction. What changes between companies is small and controlled, such as the certificate, where the invoices come from (a SAP report or a file finance drops every day) and the sheet with that company’s tax rules.
Around the daily filing there are robots to cancel invoices, to correct posting dates when the fiscal year changes and to report. 19 in total.
What happens to each invoice
- It’s collected. The robot pulls the day’s invoices from SAP or from the finance file, depending on the company, and cleans them (dates, negative amounts, separators, codes that don’t apply).
- It’s classified. A template applies that company’s tax rules and turns each line into the Tax Agency form fields.
- It goes into a queue. If a run stops halfway, the queue knows where it left off and nothing is lost or filed twice.
- It’s filed. The robot logs into the Tax Agency site with the company’s certificate, signs and checks the response.
- It’s reported. Anything that doesn’t match is set aside, and when each file is done the accounting owner gets the spreadsheet with the result of every invoice.
The robots run on Daimler’s own infrastructure, on their UiPath Orchestrator and with their credentials.
When something changes
A tax automation isn’t delivered and forgotten. When one company had to re-file its SII all at once, we moved it onto the same engine and volume stopped being a problem. When an update made the certificate window appear late and the robot couldn’t sign, we found the cause and fixed it for all of them. And when the Tax Agency, a certificate or SAP itself changes, we adapt it as part of the monthly service.
The result
Finance no longer types invoices into a portal. They review the exceptions, and filings don’t depend on office hours or holidays. Every new company that joins isn’t a new project, it’s one more deployment of the same engine.