This is where our journey continues… Spend 3 minutes of your time, it will pay itself back!
How our transparency helps you to choose (even if it‘s not for us…)
Since we get to know each other better and better, we can probably almost skip the part where we tell you that we embrace transparency and that our dream is to minimize your burden by creating effective and user-friendly solutions, within a one-stop-shop TaxSuite.
In our recent blogs, we told you about the complicated and non-transparent tool packages that are being offered in the current DAC6-market. As a direct result, we have learned that our (potential) customers‘ procurement departments are having a hard time presenting clear and comparable overviews of DAC6-software providers.
Obviously, the huge downside is that you will end up getting the opposite when you are looking to improve your control on processes and costs. Whether you will build a relationship with us or not, this is not what we want for you!
How to not compare apples to oranges
We provide software as a service, which means that you will get an end-to-end functional solution. That‘s why we can safely say that comparing is in our blood: we need to compare always and make sure that our solution 100% delivers what the legislation expects. So let us help you because there are a number of handles we can provide you to stop a trend where offerings and pricing are volatile and non-transparent.
Trust the facts, not the make-believe.
Do yourself a favor: ask these questions about the service you will get!
The following questions may help you compare apples to apples and oranges to oranges.
| Questions to the service providers | TaxModel‘s answers |
| Is the fee proposed by your firm a standard fee you offer to the market? If yes, why is it not published? If no:
How is your fee calculated for our company? What are the main KPIs/drivers for price determination? |
Yes, it is published |
| Are you willing to provide a reference / similar (size) firm to us where your tool has been offered to for price comparison? | Yes |
| Are you willing to provide a breakdown of the total fee to a fee for each office / country involved? | Yes |
| Does the license fee cover a knowledge base for all EU Member States? | Yes |
| Does the license fee cover unlimited users? | Yes |
| Does the license fee cover unlimited arrangements? | Yes |
| Does the license fee cover unlimited access to the service desk? | Yes |
| Does the license fee cover cloud provider costs? | Yes |
| Does the license fee cover unlimited conversions to XML, reporting, and refiling in all Member States? | Yes |
| Is the license fee a guaranteed fixed price per annum? | Yes |
| Does the tool allow all firms to do XML filings in all Member States and not only in their own country? | Yes |
| Does the license fee cover all maintenance/ service desk costs? | Yes |
| Are there any areas/ add-on features in your tool “locked” subject to additional pricing? If yes, please list all features that are not in scope/ | Yes, our DAC6 enforcement feature will be an add-on |
| Which parts of your license fee are one-off, and which ones are recurring? | Only training, this is one-off and optional |
| Do I have to enter into a commitment for more than 1 year? | No |
| Will there be a license by country or is all in 1 license?
If all in 1 license: Who will do the implementation? Which location will be the licensee?
|
Multinational:
1 license Intermediary: License by country in which it has offices |
What about information security standards? Ask for ISO27001!
We highly value your information, and so do our prospects and customers as they have asked us many times about our information security standards. We are glad that we invested heavily in our certification process, especially because the world we live in today teaches us that security and privacy are important.
TaxModel is one of the first tax technology companies being ISO27001 certified. This makes us proud!
Now that you plan to put your proprietary information into your DAC6 tool of choice ask yourself whether you will get clearance from your IT security department. For IT security standards, you may want to ask the following questions:
| Questions to the service providers | TaxModel‘s answers |
| Is your firm ISO27001 certified? If yes, please provide a certificate. If not, please explain your information security standards? | Yes, https://tax-model.com/news/isocertification |
| Our IT team will ask for certain reports from you and including pentest reports. Are you well familiar with this exercise? | Yes |
Don‘t forget to ask about the other technical items!
To support you with more IT-related issues, these questions can save you time. Trust us, your IT and or Risk departments will be thankful.
| Questions to the service providers | TaxModel‘s answers |
| Which identity management providers your solution can support (like Okta, Azure AD, PingIdentity etc.) | DAC6pro is primarily built on top of the Microsoft stack, hence we only support Azure AD for now. |
| Who is your cloud service provider and what is the location of the Azure datacentres? | DAC6pro is set up as microservice architecture, meaning there could technically be more than one used Azure Region. Currently, all DAC6pro resources are deployed in the Azure Region West Europe (Amsterdam).
On request, we could change the resource locations for a specific tenant. |
| What is the nature of API support that you can provide? | DAC6Pro offers an XML as a Service functionality, which potentially could be provided as an API. We use Azure API Management Portal to expose our APIs. These APIs are either authenticated with OpenID or OAuth2 protocol/flow. |
| Can you say something about your software architecture? | DAC6pro backend is fully built on the Microsoft stack.
The frontend is a Single Page Application build using Angular 9. For Data storage we use SQL Azure, Azure Table storage and Azure Blob. We‘ve implemented a microservices architecture (Azure functions, service bus communication, etc.) to allow for a scalable “serverless” experience. |
| Can you please explain your data security and data retention policy details? | Within DAC6pro, all users (and services) are authenticated and authorized with Azure Active Directory. Every tenant and their data are fully separated in silos. We use At-rest data protection provided by Azure to ensure that all data is encrypted. Azure Long Term Retention (LTR) Policy is used to guarantee backups. |
| What is your software release plan? | 1st of June: launch DAC6pro XML compatible excel sheet
1st of June: beta launch DAC6pro 1st of July: Go Live DAC6pro MVP plus DAC6xml Service Features as per brochure Post 1st of August: XML schemes from different EU Member States will be released in line with XML technical guidelines released by them; Other new features will depend on demands / wishes from users + prospects |
Please check into this article regularly, as we will be update it regularly. Whether you choose to join us or net, let the above be of help when you go through the world of DAC6-software!
TaxModel wants to embrace a new ethos, because the SaaS company of the future has nothing to hide, who wants to join our journey?
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Check the first blog about our pricing strategy: ‘Why we decided to be 100% transparent on pricing (and why that‘s a good thing)‘ on our website, click here.
