The Nexus - tax technology market insights

The Nexus Issue 26: Taxmarc

Nexus Tax Technology — Fri, 02 Oct 2026 12:31:27 GMT

Q4 taxtech hiring update

Follow the requisitions

Vendors publish positioning. Buyers publish job ads. Only one of those gets budgeted. This month The Nexus read both: every open role at 13 tax technology vendors, and 1,846 tax jobs across corporates, the Big 4 and advisory firms in 62 countries.

The supply side: one giant, and a pack running light

Avalara is hiring at a scale nobody else in the category matches. It is doing it offshore, and it is doing it with AI.

162 open roles at Avalara, more than Sovos, Thomson Reuters, CCH and Vertex combined (153)
21% of Avalara’s openings are in India
38 vendor roles carry AI, ML, LLM or agentic in the title, and 15 of them are at Avalara

The venture-backed challengers (Numeral, Fonoa, Anrok, Sphere, Taxwire) look like the incumbents on sales and engineering. The difference is what happens after the contract is signed.

4% of challenger openings are customer success or implementation, against 15% at the incumbents
92 challenger roles in total, just over half of Avalara alone

That is a deliberate product-led bet, and in the mid-market it works. It gets tested the day a challenger signs a multi-entity enterprise with an ERP, a sceptical IT team and a go-live date. Watch for the first “Head of Implementation” requisition. It will tell you the upmarket push has started.

The demand side: advisers own direct tax, trade owns indirect

Direct tax judgement is being rented, not hired. Corporates lean on their advisers for it.

35% of Big 4 tax hiring is corporate, international or transfer pricing
under 10% of in-house tax hiring is

In-house headcount is going to indirect tax, and indirect increasingly means customs and trade.

32% of in-house tax roles are indirect or trade, three times the Big 4 share
81% of those in-house indirect roles are customs and trade, not VAT
80% of tax hiring in logistics and shipping is indirect or trade, against 5% in banking
The top in-house hirers are Maersk (34), Amazon (23), Expeditors (17), Bosch (12) and Vodafone (11)

The gap, and the rival nobody puts on the slide

VAT and sales tax teams are not staffing up to meet the mandates.

6% of in-house tax hires are VAT or sales tax, and Amazon alone posts 12 of those 70
20 of 3,195 tracked roles mention e-invoicing, DRC or CTC

ViDA, Germany, Poland, Belgium and France are landing on teams that aren’t growing. That gap is what tax technology sells into. But the buyer has two options, and the second one is growing.

13% of tax hiring at tech and e-commerce firms is tax technology, against 5% across corporates
Amazon, Stripe and Agoda are all hiring tax-engine engineers

For every vendor on the chart, the hardest deal may not be against a competitor. It may be against the buyer’s decision to build it themselves.

What it means

Scale is Avalara’s moat. Product-led is the challengers’ bet, and the implementation bill is coming. And the real white space is in-house: stretched VAT teams, tariff-driven trade hiring, and an adviser channel that still owns direct tax. The vendors that win the next cycle will sell into all three.

Now for this weeks feature, the third SAP VAT specialist we’ve reviewed in this series, Taxmarc let’s see how they cmopare against the likes of Meridian and Taxera

The SAP-Native VAT Engine PwC Handed Back

E-invoicing mandates are pushing buyers toward platforms that determine, transmit and file in one stack. Taxmarc is betting the other way: that getting VAT right inside SAP, on every document in a chain, is still worth buying on its own. For SAP-heavy goods movers it may be.

WHAT TAXMARC ACTUALLY IS

Taxmarc is a Utrecht-based VAT determination and controls engine that runs inside SAP. It works out the right treatment for multi-party, multi-document flows (chain transactions, drop shipments, pick-ups, self-invoices), then checks every posting in real time and blocks non-compliant ones before they post. Intrastat reconciliation and VAT ID validation sit alongside. E-invoicing transmission, managed filing, special regimes and AI are essentially absent, and US sales tax is handed to an external engine. It is small: roughly 11–20 staff, about 20 enterprise customers, and an estimated €2.5–4.0M in annual revenue. If you’re an SAP-run multinational moving goods across EU borders, it belongs on your longlist.

WHERE IT BEATS THE MARKET BASELINE

Taxmarc beats the baseline on the two things its buyer cares about most: accurate determination across full SAP document flows, and audit-grade controls. Real-time blocking plus a logged trail of every parameter and decision is the strongest SAP-level control story we’ve profiled. SAP certification across R/3, S/4HANA and RISE with SAP S/4HANA Cloud scores a leading 4. Nearly everywhere else it falls below baseline: no published jurisdiction list, no CTC transmission, no non-SAP connectors, no disclosed security certification.

PORTFOLIO ANALYSIS

The portfolio has barely moved in years. Determination is the business, an estimated ~60% of revenue, with reporting, analytics and integration at roughly 10% each. The only ownership event is the company’s own: PwC bought the IP in 2015 and handed it back to the founder in January 2022, staying on as implementation partner. Releases have continued, through 3.2, but public news goes quiet after January 2025. It’s a clean, single-codebase product, and the risk is its narrow scope. Treat Taxmarc as one layer in your stack, not the whole stack, and budget for the joins.

BUSINESS MODEL, DELIVERY MODEL AND SIZE BAND FITS

Business model fit
• B2B goods: 3 – Strong fit; built for SAP goods flows with triangulation, consignment, self-billing and Intrastat.
• B2C goods: 1 – Patchy fit; proven at one large SAP-run travel retailer, irrelevant to e-commerce sellers.
• B2B/B2C digital services: 1 – Patchy fit; goods-movement logic solves problems these buyers don’t have.
• B2B/B2C services: 1 – Patchy fit; the controls help any SAP business, but the core value lies in goods movements.
Delivery model fit
• Software-only: 3 – Strong fit; annual licence, with standard flows self-configurable.
• Software + managed services: 1 – Patchy fit; the services wrapper is PwC’s, not Taxmarc’s.
• Managed services-led and self-serve: 0 – Poor fit; neither exists.
Size band fit
• Small: 0 – Poor fit; the enterprise licence and the SAP prerequisite rule it out.
• Medium: 2 – Good fit; governance and controls score 3, but only if the whole estate runs SAP.
• Large: 2 – Good fit (3 for B2B goods); handles four-party chains across 11–18-country footprints, capped by vendor scale and no security certification.

CUSTOMER AND EMPLOYEE SENTIMENTS

There isn’t any, and that is the finding. Taxmarc sells to about 20 enterprises, largely through PwC, and has no reason to court review sites. That also means buyers can’t validate it through them.

• G2, Capterra, Trustpilot, Gartner Peer Insights, TrustRadius: no profile found.

• Vendor and partner cases (two): positive by construction; fewer tax errors, and 98% automatic determination for an 18-country chemicals client.

• Glassdoor, Indeed, RepVue: no profile. LinkedIn shows ~11–20 staff, mostly SAP developers and functional consultants.

• Sales org: no visible sales, marketing or customer-success function; pipeline runs through PwC.

Net-net: credible product signals, unanswered support question. Implementation and upgrade risk sits with a very small bench.

IF YOU’RE BUILDING OR BUYING INDIRECT TAX CAPABILITY — HERE’S THE READ

For buyers

If you’re a Large or upper-Medium B2B goods group on SAP, with complex EU chains and native SAP tax logic that keeps failing audits, shortlist Taxmarc for the determination and controls layer. Pair it with a separate e-invoicing and filing provider. If you run a mixed ERP estate or plan to leave SAP, the non-SAP route is determination without controls, so price that in. If you’re a digital-services business, an e-commerce seller or genuinely Small, look elsewhere. Whoever you are, get source-code escrow, a direct support SLA and a price cap on adding countries before you sign, and ask for two references PwC didn’t introduce.

For prospective employees
• Strong move for SAP ABAP developers and FICO/tax functional consultants who want deep ownership of a specialist engine.
• High-risk for sales and customer-success roles: there’s no visible function to join, and pipeline depends on PwC.
• Ask about ownership: it’s founder-owned with no disclosed investors, so probe succession, equity and any sale plans.

A selection of of opportunities to connect in person and interact online over the next few weeks.

OCTOBER 2026

ITR AI in Tax Forum 2026 — Middle East (Conference)

International Tax Review | 6 October 2026 | Dubai, UAE

ITR’s AI in Tax Forum comes to the Middle East, bringing together in-house tax leaders, advisors, technology providers and tax authorities to examine the fast-evolving role of AI in the region’s tax landscape.

Event Page →

Digital Accountancy Show 2026 (Conference)

Easyfairs / Digital Accountancy | 7–8 October 2026 | ExCeL London, London, UK

The UK’s largest accountancy technology event, now in its sixth year, bringing together 7,000+ accountants and finance leaders to explore AI-driven automation, workflow tools, and digital transformation — co-located with the Digital Finance Show.

Event Page →

2026 TEI & Thomson Reuters Webinar: Tax Technology Modernization (Webinar)

TEI / Thomson Reuters | 7 October 2026 | Online

A joint TEI and Thomson Reuters session on what’s really holding tax departments back from technology modernization — practical barriers, sequencing, and lessons from departments further along the curve.

KPMG Tax Technology Bite LIVE! (In-Person Session)

KPMG Meijburg / Vertex | 7 October 2026, 8:30am–5:30pm CEST | KPMG Meijburg Office, Amstelveen, Netherlands

A free, in-person KPMG and Vertex session on indirect tax technology, digitalisation, and e-invoicing readiness — part of a run of Benelux tax technology roundtables this autumn.

Event Page →

Join PwC and Meridian to Discuss Navigating the Future of Tax Compliance (Roundtable)

PwC / Meridian Global Services | 8 October 2026, 13:30–17:30 | PwC Amsterdam Offices, Thomas R. Malthusstraat 5, Amsterdam, Netherlands

An in-person roundtable bringing together finance, tax, and IT leaders to discuss the future of tax compliance, indirect tax automation, and readiness for evolving mandates.

Event Page →

Power of 3: PwC, SAP & Vertex (Roundtable)

PwC / SAP / Vertex | 15 October 2026 | TBC

A joint client event from PwC, SAP, and Vertex on e-invoicing, SAP transformation, and tax technology, flagged by PwC’s Ron Sperling as part of a run of autumn 2026 events. Private/invite-only — no public registration page found; details expected closer to the date.

Billions Left on the Table? Unlock Travel Recovery and Maximise ROI with Ramp & VAT IT (Webinar)

VAT IT / Ramp | 20 October 2026, 11:30am | Online

A joint VAT IT and Ramp webinar on unlocking VAT recovery on corporate travel spend and maximising ROI from expense and reclaim processes.

TEI Annual Conference 2026 (Conference)

TEI — Tax Executives Institute | 21 October 2026 | Grand Hyatt Nashville, Nashville, TN

TEI’s flagship annual conference for senior in-house tax professionals, featuring high-level sessions on federal, state, and international tax developments, technology, and the evolving role of the corporate tax function.

5th Annual VAT Compliance and Indirect Tax Forum 2026 — ITX (Conference)

Amistat Group | 21–22 October 2026 | Van der Valk Hotel, Brussels, Belgium

Over 20 senior speakers across 20 high-level practical sessions on VAT compliance, AI in tax technology, and e-invoicing, plus 6+ hours of dedicated networking. Sponsored by Blue dot, Fintua, Meridian, 360WEDO, and VATabout.

Event Page →

RTC Webinar: 2026 Tax Compliance Virtual Symposium — The Evolving E-Invoicing Landscape Across APAC (Webinar)

RTC Suite | 22 October 2026, 10:00am CEST | Online

A virtual symposium covering the evolving e-invoicing mandates and compliance models across Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, Singapore, Australia and New Zealand.

IVA Autumn Conference 2026 (Conference)

International VAT Association (IVA) | 22–23 October 2026 | Marseille, France

The IVA’s flagship autumn gathering brings together VAT professionals, businesses, tax authorities, and international organisations from around the world for one of Europe’s leading VAT events. Full agenda and speakers to be announced closer to the date.

Event Page →

ITR AI in Tax Forum 2026 — USA (Conference)

International Tax Review | 26 October 2026 | New York, USA

ITR’s dedicated AI in Tax Forum returns to the US, examining how artificial intelligence is moving from early promise to everyday reality across direct and indirect tax functions — with senior in-house perspectives on implementation, governance, and what’s next.

Event Page →

E-Rechnungs-Gipfel 2026 — Repeat Edition (Conference)

Vereon AG / E-Invoicing Exchange Summit | 26–28 October 2026 | Frankfurt am Main, Germany

A second Frankfurt edition of Germany’s e-invoicing summit, added after the June Berlin edition sold out — covering XRechnung, ZUGFeRD, Peppol and EN16931 compliance ahead of the January 2027 mandate deadline.

Event Page →

ITR Global Transfer Pricing Forum 2026 — USA (Conference)

International Tax Review | 27 October 2026 | New York, USA

ITR’s flagship US transfer pricing forum, bringing together in-house tax leaders and advisors to examine the latest developments in TP policy, controversy, and technology-enabled compliance.

Event Page →

NOVEMBER 2026

42nd Annual TEI/SJSU High Tech Tax Institute (Conference)

TEI — Tax Executives Institute / San José State University | 2–3 November 2026 | Crowne Plaza Cabana, 4290 El Camino Real, Palo Alto, CA

The prestigious annual gathering of tax professionals from the technology sector, covering federal, state, international, and transactional tax with particular relevance to high-tech companies. A must-attend for in-house tax teams in Silicon Valley.

2026 TechTAXcelerate: Building Smarter Tax Functions Through Technology, Data & AI (Virtual Conference)

TEI — Tax Executives Institute | 9–13 November 2026 | Online

TEI’s dedicated technology-focused virtual conference, exploring how in-house tax functions are using data, automation and AI to modernize processes and build smarter, leaner tax departments.

Tax Technology Conference 2026 (Conference)

Tax Technology Academy / Verlag Dr. Otto Schmidt | 10–11 November 2026 | Kap Europa, Frankfurt am Main, Germany

Germany’s premier tax technology conference brings together over 500 tax and tech experts for two days of keynotes, deep dives, and project insights covering automation, GenAI, compliance process design, and digital transformation — with a focus on delivering measurable value.

Event Page →

CIOT Indirect Taxes Annual Conference 2026 (Conference)

Chartered Institute of Taxation | 12 November 2026 | One Great George Street, Westminster, London, UK

The Chartered Institute of Taxation’s flagship annual conference for indirect tax professionals, covering the latest VAT, customs, and excise developments, practical compliance guidance, and emerging issues for businesses operating in the UK and internationally.

Event Page →

SAP for Global Trade & Tax Conference 2026 (Conference)

TAC Insights / Meridian Global Services | 12–13 November 2026 | Hotel NH Malaga, Malaga, Spain

The premier annual forum for SAP users and experts dedicated to mastering the complexities of international commerce. Two days of actionable strategies in trade compliance, customs automation, and next-generation tax technology built on the SAP ecosystem. Meridian Global Services among key participants.

Event Page →

SYNERGY 2026 (Conference)

Thomson Reuters | 16–19 November 2026 | Fontainebleau Las Vegas, Las Vegas, NV

Thomson Reuters’ comprehensive annual conference for tax, accounting, audit, legal, and corporate professionals — the largest event in the Thomson Reuters calendar. Extensive product training, CPE/CLE credit opportunities, and insights from leading industry experts. In-person only in 2026.

Tax Evolution Summit 2026 — From Evolution to Revolution: Accelerating the Tax Function (Conference)

Tax Evolution Summit / PwC | 18–19 November 2026 | FEMA Madrid, Av. del Partenón, 5, Madrid, Spain

Co-hosted with PwC and designed for senior audiences including CFOs, Tax Directors, and Tax Transformation/IT leads across EMEA, this year’s edition combines with a second PwC event in Madrid on 18 November for cross-event networking, exploring how tax functions move from incremental evolution to real technology-driven transformation.

Event Page →

14th Tax Strategies & Experiences (Forum)

Thought Leader Global | 18–19 November 2026 | Radisson Blu Centre, Amsterdam, Netherlands

A senior peer-to-peer forum for tax leaders to share strategies and experiences on tax technology, transformation, and evolving compliance demands — running in parallel with other major November tax events.

Event Page →

3rd Tax Technology & Compliance Summit 2026 (Conference)

Tax Technology Summit | 18 November 2026 | Grand Millennium Hotel, Dubai, UAE

The region’s premier gathering for tax technology and compliance leaders, focusing on VAT and e-invoicing readiness, AI-driven compliance, and the accelerated digital transformation of tax administration across the GCC. Expert panels, industry talks, and peer-level networking.

Event Page →

Southern Europe Tax Summit (Conference)

Uniglobal | 24–25 November 2026 | Milan, Italy

Uniglobal’s Southern Europe gathering for indirect tax and tax technology professionals, covering regional VAT, e-invoicing, and compliance developments across Italy, Spain, and neighbouring markets.

Event Page →

*any organisers or events I’ve missed? please let me know.

A curated selection of blogs, white-papers and on demand content published by multiple organisartions across the landscape, organised into a themed learning path.

MONTH — OCTOBER 2026

Market Consolidation, Live Mandates, Post-Filing Pillar Two & Synthesis

October is the most event-dense month in the program to date. France’s CTC mandate went fully live in September — the first post-live analysis is now available. Fonoa closed the largest funding round in indirect tax software history and acquired PwC’s platform in May, but the integration story is only now landing in the market. Orbitax shipped GIR amendment tooling in September, directly responding to what 1,700+ live filings revealed about the complexity of the first Pillar Two cycle. And the UAE’s October 30 ASP appointment deadline makes this the last actionable window before the January 2027 enforcement date. The four weeks are structured to carry all of this — market consolidation and its implications, the live e-invoicing operating reality, the post-filing direct tax landscape, and a synthesis capstone.

Week 1 · 5–10 October

Market Consolidation: Fonoa’s $110M Round, the PwC Edge Acquisition & What It Signals

01📖Fonoa Raises $110M and Acquires PwC’s Indirect Tax EdgeFonoa10–12 min

02📖AI for Serious People: Fonoa’s $110M Series C and the Acquisition of PwC’s Indirect Tax EdgeDawn Capital8–10 min

03📖The 2026 AI TaxTech Map: Every Major Partnership YTDIndependent analysis10–12 min

04🎥Sovos TaxScapes Q3 2026: What’s Changing in Indirect Tax — US and GlobalSovos45–60 min

Week total: 3 articles + 1 webinar · ~73–94 min

Week 2 · 12–17 October

France Live, UAE Deadline & the E-Invoicing Operating Reality

05📖Sovos Launches Compliance Network to Address Unprecedented Wave of Global E-Invoicing MandatesSovos10–12 min

06📖Sovos Brings Global 2000 Clients Live in France Ahead of the World’s Most Complex E-Invoicing MandateSovos8–10 min

07📖Global E-Invoicing Mandates Are Becoming an ERP Architecture TestERP.today8–10 min

08📖UAE E-Invoicing: What Businesses Need to Know Before the October 30 ASP DeadlineThomson Reuters / Pagero8–10 min

09📖E-Invoicing in Norway and Latest European VAT UpdatesMarosa VAT8–10 min

10🎥Countdown to Slovakia 2027: Preparing for Mandatory E-Invoicing and Digital ReportingSovos45–60 min

Week total: 5 articles + 1 webinar · ~87–112 min

Week 3 · 19–24 October

Post-Filing Pillar Two: What 1,700 Real Filings Actually Revealed

11📖Orbitax Powers 1,700+ Pillar Two Filings Across 34 JurisdictionsOrbitax10–12 min

12📖Orbitax Introduces GIR Amendments for Pillar Two GloBE ReturnsOrbitax8–10 min

13📖The Pillar Two Filing Landscape: Understanding Form Types and How to Stay on Top of ThemOrbitax10–12 min

14📖Understanding the GloBE Information Return: Why XML, XSD Schemas and Validation Rules MatterOrbitax12–15 min

15🎥Pillar Two Compliance: Grant Thornton & Orbitax StrategiesOrbitax / Grant Thornton60 min · CPE

Week total: 4 articles + 1 webinar · ~100–109 min

Week 4 · 26–31 October (Capstone)

Platform Selection, Maturity & Synthesis: Bringing October’s Threads Together

16📖8 Best Cross-Border VAT Compliance Software: 2026 GuideKintsugi12–15 min

17📖Ready Before the Notice: A Sales Tax & VAT Audit PlaybookAnrok / KPMG20–25 min

18📖2025 Tax Recap and 2026 Preview for Accounting FirmsWolters Kluwer / CCH10–12 min

19📖AI-Enabled Tax TransformationDeloitte Global20–25 min

20🎥Taking Corporate Tax Management Beyond Provision with Longviewinsightsoftware / International Tax Review60 min

Week total: 4 articles + 1 webinar · ~122–137 min

Programme Summary

Week 1Week 2Week 3Week 4October totalThemeMarket consolidation & the Fonoa/PwC dealFrance live, UAE deadline & e-invoicing operating realityPost-filing Pillar Two: what 1,700 real filings revealedPlatform selection, maturity & synthesisArticles354416Webinars11114 (+ 1 bonus)Est. Time~1.25–1.5 hrs~1.5–2 hrs~1.75–2 hrs~2–2.5 hrs~6.5–8 hrs

September total: 20 articles + 6 webinars = 26 resources · ~532–615 min (~8.5–10 hrs)

*any cool content I’ve missed? please let me know.

A selection of open roles across tax tech vendors and tax advisory/consulting businesses who are involved in tax technology.

In house roles are provided courtesy of the smart people at https://taxjobs.ai

Use the column headers to sort, or the search function and don’t forget to navigate all pages! And feel free to share the love on socials.

*I do this using an AI agent and due to the volume, I don’t check every link, so please let me know if any of these don’t work or have disappeared when you follow them.

Want to go deeper? Let’s chat

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The Nexus Issue 25: Interview with Alphatax

Nexus Tax Technology — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 08:30:40 GMT

The Sales Tax Arms Race Heats Up

On Wednesday of this week Numeral announced series C funding of $100M, making them the most highly capitalised of the US venture backed cohort of firms that are disrupting sales tax market, long dominated by the likes of Avalara and Vertex.

Also Fonoa, fresh off of their recent series C (and actually the most heavily invested of the lot, albeit not US based) leaked through their CEO’s LinkedIn post, the appointment of a new head of US tax engine, with some pretty serious heritage (Taxjar, Zamora, Taxwire) so are clearly gearing up to continue bridging the gaps in their portfolio and expand their ICP.

Outside of that, this week was a bit different for me, I had the pleasure of being interviewed for Alphatax’s Tax, Tech and other stuff podcast by Russell Gammon, resident AI supremo, cheif innovation officer, wine lover and all round nice guy.

I’ve done podcasts before as a vendor representative and it’s always been an effort to push a certain narrative and I think that comes through and tends to make them somewhat boring. This was nothing like that and I throughly enjoyed the conversation with Russell (who you should speak to if you ever get the chance) and I hope it comes through.

Behind the E-Invoicing Noise: The Nexus’ View on Mandates, AI, and What Comes Next

📽️ 𝗪𝗮𝘁𝗰𝗵 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗳𝘂𝗹𝗹 𝘃𝗶𝗱𝗲𝗼 𝗲𝗽𝗶𝘀𝗼𝗱𝗲: https://lnkd.in/e4Q7Nk5a
🎧 𝗣𝗿𝗲𝗳𝗲𝗿 𝗮𝘂𝗱𝗶𝗼? 𝗟𝗶𝘀𝘁𝗲𝗻 𝗵𝗲𝗿𝗲: https://lnkd.in/ebsNYjAK

This month I joined Russell Gammon on Alphatax’s Tax, Tech and Other Stuff podcast for the show’s first indirect tax episode in three years. Russell and I talked through why e-invoicing dominates every feed, whether the UK’s 2029 mandate is MTD all over again, why tax teams only buy on deadlines, what AI is really doing for vendors and in-house teams, and what happens to a market when the barriers to entry collapse. What follows is an edited version of that conversation.

Russell Gammon: Give us the potted history. Who are you, and how did you end up in indirect tax?

Paul Guyer: I’ve worked in indirect tax and tax technology for about 15 years, but I started somewhere completely different. I grew up in Essex and didn’t go to university. I went into chefing, lived in Spain for a couple of years and trained as a chef, came back to the UK, did that for a bit and hated it, then got into document management. That has come full circle, because invoice capture, invoice transmission and EDI are a big factor in the indirect tax world right now.

In 2011 I joined Thomson Reuters as they were building out their indirect tax line-up through acquisitions. I was one of the first few dozen people outside North America working in indirect tax, which was quite cool. A few years later I joined Avalara, which wasn’t well known over here. They were doing well in the US, disrupting the mid-market, and I joined as employee number ten in Europe. I headed up sales and partnerships there through the IPO, then decided it was time to try something new. For the last six years I’ve done a very similar thing at Vertex. Since earlier this year I’ve been independent, as a consultant and an investor. What I’m really interested in is helping smaller businesses in tax tech grow.

Building The Nexus: From Research Project to Community

Russell: You’ve been building a community called The Nexus, which is where we first got in touch. What’s it been like?

Paul: It’s been great, and really fun. I’ve learned how to start a business from scratch, which is intellectually rewarding. But it started as a research project. I knew I didn’t want to go back into a big corporate role and didn’t know what I did want, so I started looking around the market. So much is going on: indirect, direct, the operating layers, AI, research, tax credits. There are established incumbents and new players, communities of customers and partners, and around all of that the marketing, the events, the thought leadership and the job opportunities.

When I was on the vendor side I had my own little sphere: my customers, my competitors, my partners. That’s all I cared about for the longest time. There was a much broader environment I wasn’t aware of, and I thought it might be useful to other people, so I share it every week through Substack, which is a fancy name for a newsletter.

Close to a thousand people follow along each week and It’s brought me a load of interesting conversations. We wouldn’t be having this one otherwise. I’ve met founders and in-house practitioners, and I’ve just interviewed a tax tech product manager at Uber to find out what really matters when you run a scaled tax technology operation internally. These are things I’d never found out and people I’d never come into contact with.

Russell: It’s easy to sit in your bubble, knowing your space, your vendors and your networks, and forget how much bigger the world is. For everyone doing something, there’s at least one other saying “we do that too, differently and better.”

Why Is E-Invoicing So Busy? Lazy Marketing and a Real Regime

Russell: If my LinkedIn feed isn’t talking about AI, it’s talking about e-invoicing. For listeners who are heavier on direct tax: what’s the situation, and why is it so busy?

Paul: I’m going to say something contentious. Why it’s so busy on LinkedIn is a bit of lazy marketing, to be honest. If you’re in sales, one of the great things is having catalysts, or compelling events: lines in the sand where people have to do something. You have that with Pillar 2 on your side. E-invoicing is the same. A new mandate lands in France, or the UAE, or wherever, and suddenly there’s a net-new obligation you never had before. Because of the “e”, it lends itself to technology, so all the technology companies have jumped on it. A lot of indirect tax businesses have either built products or, more likely, procured and acquired their way into the market to capture this wave of software adoption.

“Why it’s so busy on LinkedIn — it’s a bit of lazy marketing, to be honest.”

Everyone is promoting it, and everyone is looking for someone who’s going to get triggered by the UAE or France. But in the background there’s a long-overdue modernisation of tax collection. It happened in direct tax as well. In Europe we talk about the VAT gap, which is the difference between the VAT that should be collected and the VAT that is. I don’t know the latest number, but it’s typically around €100 billion. Whether it’s fraud, inefficient collection or non-reporting, e-invoicing is a measure to bring that gap down. In some models the authority inserts itself between seller and buyer: if you want to raise an invoice and get paid, you have to communicate it to the authority. That stops some of the off-the-books activity and makes sure things are reported correctly.

Part of the noise is that none of it is harmonised. There’s overarching legislation, but as with most things in the EU there’s local derogation at member-state level, so everyone does something slightly different. France does it differently from Germany, which does it differently from Spain and Hungary, and outside the EU it diverges further. That’s why it’s hard.

Then there’s ViDA. Bits of it drop at different points, but the big one is digital reporting in 2030, which brings cross-border transactions into scope. Most of what’s happening today is domestic, a French entity selling to French customers, mostly B2B with some B2C. In 2030 it goes cross-border, so there’s a big jump in what gets transmitted, and I think it also becomes quite commoditised. My prediction is that the market settles on the Peppol standard, the divergence slows if not stops, and critical mass builds around a certain platform. Maybe I’m wrong.

Russell: Regulatory timelines that stretch out five to ten years tend to slip. But e-invoicing has real rubber on the road already, and people are doing things. So what does it mean for the UK, which is adopting in 2029?

The UK’s 2029 Mandate: MTD All Over Again?

Russell: Having lived through MTD for VAT, which looked like a big change, got watered down, then hit COVID and got messy, it doesn’t feel like it was the golden bullet HMRC wanted. Is e-invoicing round two, or is it more of the same rather than a replacement?

Paul: I think it’s incremental. MTD, and we’re getting acronym-heavy now, was a bit of a non-event. Maybe not for SMBs, but a sophisticated business, say a FTSE company already filing VAT with a corporate tax team, hardly found it groundbreaking to use a piece of software to do it. It’s probably trickier for smaller businesses, but I wasn’t involved in that layer of the market and haven’t stayed close to any published data on the net impact. I do think it got us ready for what’s coming.

I think HMRC did it in quite a good way. It was fairly progressive at the time. Most authorities mandate an output: you have to transmit this file in this format, and we don’t care how you arrive at it. HMRC said you need to use a piece of software, and there needs to be a trail showing how you got to the number. That gets people off home-built Excel spreadsheets and into a more controlled environment, which lays the foundation for what comes next. E-invoicing is a layer on top, and most taxpayers are used to dealing with HMRC digitally by now.

I’m not an expert on the legislation. I’m really a sales guy. But the UK is going with Peppol, so we’re not doing a Brexit.

“We’re not doing a Brexit. We’re not going off the rails and implementing something completely new.”

It also means there’ll be a lot of expertise in the market on Peppol, on developing systems, integrating and building the data models. You lean on an existing network of people who’ve done this before, maybe in different places, using the same underlying standards. So, again, maybe a bit of a non-event.

Russell: I’d love more of tax to be a non-event. This feels like an upgrade to what already happens rather than a breaking change, and by 2029 there’ll be even more expertise around.

Tax Buys on Deadlines: What MTD and Pillar 2 Teach Us

Paul: What’s it been like on the direct side? It’s still incremental, isn’t it?

Russell: The parallel in my head is MTD for VAT. Everyone ran up to a deadline, it moved back a year because of COVID, everyone ran up to the new one, and then there was a massive drop-off. Three, six, twelve months later people revisited it and realised the reason they were buying software wasn’t the transmission of nine boxes. It was that their Excel model was horrible and broken.

Pillar 2 has surprised me. A couple of months after the first deadlines I expected a big drop-off. No one’s ringing up to sign a contract tomorrow, but the number of conversations is striking. We got year one over the line, it was a bit challenging, maybe a bit expensive, so can we change our approach for year two? It’s incremental: take half a dozen of your 20 jurisdictions from outsourced to software, or move from a filing-only tool to a full calculation engine.

Paul: The readiness aspect is interesting. As software vendors or consultants, we’d like to sell customers on getting ready ahead of when it’s needed: use the downtime to change your processes and put a more robust operating model or technology backbone in place for next time. I never saw much of that. There was always another rush to the line. These projects are sensitive. They cost money, they tie up internal resources, and companies are trying to do other things.

“Tax suffers from not having discretionary budget for technology, and having to go cap in hand to finance or to IT.”

Burning platforms have been useful for tax teams to get the investment they need, but it’s hard to get projects spun up in the periods between deadlines.

Russell: I’ve seen good behaviour, a carrot-and-stick approach. Pillar 2 is coming, so we’ll need to buy something, whether software, outsourcing or a mix, and that means there’s a budget. But then people say: while we’re at it, let’s revisit provision, because it’s a massive source of information. Some are cutting their reliance on outsourcing from 20 countries to 10, and the savings fund software that fixes provision and country-by-country reporting as well as Pillar 2. That’s a good answer for the CFO: the outsourcing bill goes down and software usage goes up.

Paul: If you can make the economics work. Quite often the money doesn’t go down. That’s the challenge.

AI in Practice: Agents, Research and the Carpenter’s Jig

Russell: As a sole practitioner setting up a business, have you been using AI for absolutely everything? And how are you using it in indirect tax more generally?

Paul: For me it’s been a learning curve. I wouldn’t say I’ve gone all-in the way some people have. But I use it in the newsletter to scrape data sources. I collect jobs data every week across the industry and in-house teams, and to aggregate that you have to visit several dozen websites and get behind the third-party systems they use, the applicant tracking systems and so on. AI has been brilliant for that. You build an agent that crawls all the sites, brings the data back, formats it, and hands it to you ready to cut and paste.

I also use it for research. I have a standard format for researching a vendor, which I do quite often. The tool looks at the website and 20 or 30 public sources, aggregates it all and produces a report in a consistent format. Then I eyeball it, make changes, and add my own knowledge as context.

It must be hard for people in industry at the moment, because they’ve been told to use AI and it’s interesting to see how it gets measured. I spoke to someone at a large payments company who said they’d had a dashboard of token usage per person, and if you were high on it, you got slammed for costing too much. Now they track token usage per outcome. You don’t get dinged for usage if you’re generating outcomes. You get dinged if you’re creating bots that aren’t doing anything useful and that you’re not deploying. Often you need to blend two metrics to make sense of it.

Another idea stuck with me. A guy I follow on a podcast about software and GTM said that everything you build isn’t a product. What AI has allowed is for knowledge workers to build specialist tools. If you’re a carpenter and there’s a particular thing you do with the chairs you make, you build yourself a jig for it.

“If you do a certain thing in your job, you can build yourself a tool to do that.”

It might not be adopted by the whole company or the whole industry, but it might help you, and I think we all need to do some of that.

Vendor AI: Co-Pilots Look Nice, MCP Moves the Needle

Paul: On the vendor side, there’s an internal and an external application of AI. Internally, software engineering velocity has massively increased. You can have one developer doing the work of five, or whatever the latest number the AI labs quote is. That’s brilliant if you’re a software company.

The other area disrupted internally is tax research. One of the main selling points of a Vertex, a Thomson Reuters or a Sovos is that we can research indirect tax legislation across 190 countries and keep it up to date every month. That’s brilliant. It’s what you need and what you’re paying for. But you don’t need a team of 100 to do it now. You might need a team of ten. There’s some interesting data on job descriptions in tax, and we’re seeing a shift from research roles to technology roles. That’s not surprising, but I think it will be quite profound for that part of the industry.

On what vendors are actually shipping in AI, present company excepted, I think it’s been a bit underwhelming. We’ve seen co-pilots, and conversational interfaces where you say “create a bar chart of my UK tax exposure over the last three quarters.” It looks nice, but I don’t know if it really moves the needle. People are building MCP servers, and I think that’s where the value will be realised. If you’re operating a very agentic, AI-heavy environment internally and you just want the bits of the software you really need:

“You don’t want a UX anymore. You don’t want all of the features, because you’ve tooled yourself to do a lot of that.”

It’s not a particularly impressive feature, but I think it will deliver a lot of value to end users, especially on the transactional side.

Russell: Indirect tax is very different from corporate tax and Pillar 2, because it’s so data-heavy. There’s a lot of data in Pillar 2, but comparatively it’s tiny next to millions of rows. And MCP is a conversation I’ve been having this week. As a vendor, we want to build our own agents because we know how they work and can keep them within guardrails. But the customers at the leading edge say: we’ve got our agents, we just want to plug them in. That’s fine, and it means having APIs that let agents do what they need.

It also has big implications for audit trails. Do I want an audit trail that just says “done by agent”? That isn’t the same as “done by Joe Bloggs.” If someone comes in two years later because it went wrong, you want to know who did what, not just that an agent did it, and then whose fault is that? I don’t think we’ve got there yet, but we’ve been thinking about it.

Paul: I agree. It gets you away from the black box.

Warranty, Indemnity and the SaaSpocalypse

Paul: We had the SaaSpocalypse earlier in the year. A company’s valuation is a bet on its ability to make money ten years down the line, or twenty, depending on the ratios at the time, and that’s under pressure because AI might not disrupt everything today, but in ten years the market landscape will look a bit different. For tax tech, though, there’s a defensible layer around indemnity and warranty. You buy a piece of software because it’s warranted to do what it says. If I buy a vendor’s product and it doesn’t do what it said, I have recourse.

But say I build an agent to go and file my tax return.

“If the agent decides to go and do something differently because the model’s changed, then what’s my recourse?”

Am I going to get my money back? Am I going to be able to defend that in any way? Probably not. I think that’s one of the reasons there’s still quite a lot of hesitation around AI adoption in our part of the market.

Russell: It will all shake out over time, but it will take time. It’s not a case of everything happening tomorrow and the robots doing all our tax returns.

Who Wins? Incumbents, Start-Ups and a Fragmenting Market

Russell: You do weekly reports on vendors, and they’re thorough, so you must have a deep understanding of these businesses. Are there movers and shakers? Who wins: the heavy incumbents or the small start-ups? Is there enough pie for everyone?

Paul: I do have a theory. The market is still growing, but I don’t think it’s speeding up overall. The growth is speeding up in different areas. The financials tell the story, but a lot of these companies aren’t public, so you can’t see exactly what’s going on. Where you can, you see a slowdown in growth at some of the big companies, and at the same time heavy financing of smaller businesses. There’s one company, and I won’t name it, a US-based indirect tax company that has raised three rounds, pre-seed, seed and Series A, of around $30 million, something like that, in less than 18 months. That’s very quick cycling, but there’s growth commensurate with it: something like a 9x step in value between rounds within 18 months. The investors are seeing something.

Because of the engineering velocity and the ability to research tax so much more efficiently than before, I think the barriers to entry have really dropped. We’re seeing a slew of new entrants, AI-native, AI-first, AI-enabled, whatever you want to call them, making use of that, and some of them are winning, picking up funding and growing. So the market is fragmenting away from the big two or three giant vendors and distributing outward.

The other thing is platforming and M&A. Whether it’s under private equity or otherwise, we’re definitely seeing roll-up activity, and there are a lot of people buying up e-invoicing companies on the indirect side, which makes sense. We’ll see more of it as successful, growing companies want to assemble portfolios that give them a better wedge once they’ve acquired a customer. That’s how you drive share of wallet up, through new products and adjacent areas.

“It’s not going to be concentrated in two or three vendors. It’s going to be happening here and everywhere.”

Russell: One company doing three rounds in 18 months has shades of something bigger. A lot of the world is taking an existing process and putting some AI on the side to make it incrementally better. We may be seeing the first of those that says: let’s rethink the whole thing and work out how to do it from the start. Look at legal. Harvey announced this week that it has raised $550 million at a $15.5 billion valuation, and it’s about four years old. If you look at the ARR and the opportunity, it makes sense, even if it’s slightly bonkers. I think we’re seeing our own version of that in tax.

Paul: I spoke to two companies this week trying to do Harvey for tax research. You go in, it understands your business, you ask it a question, and it gives you an answer and cites all the legislation. It’s really good stuff. And there’s so much application beyond the core platforms, in all the jobs to be done: the little things people would have taken to in-house teams or paid consultants for. A lot of that is now being done by software, or can be.

Russell: The interesting flip is from software as a service to services as software.

Five Years Out: What Changes and What Doesn’t

Russell: The crystal ball question. Where are we in five years, and crucially, what has changed and what hasn’t?

Paul: A lot is going to change. On people, I really believe the entry layer of accounting and tax work is going to be challenged by AI, and that’s going to be really hard for people.

“If you can’t do the grunt work to learn how to manage, what do you do?”

I spoke with someone recently whose advice was: learn to orchestrate. Understand the data models you’re using, because increasingly you’ll be doing deterministic, decision-based work on data. You have to know how to prompt, but you also need to understand your underlying data and how to orchestrate work properly. That’s going to hit every industry, ours included. [Related: Diyan Mihaylov makes a similar argument in Inside Uber’s Tax Stack]

On vendors, we’re going to see more and more market entrants. You’ve probably heard of TaxTech 500. The thought that there’d be 500 vendors in tax tech ten years ago would have been bizarre. And that’s obviously not the whole field: they just did a report on the UAE, and there are 200 e-invoicing vendors there, and that’s probably only half of them. So I think there’s more fragmentation, and consolidation is still going to be a theme.

In-house, what I see at the moment is less aggregation of everything under one vendor. I think we’ll see more best-of-breed implementations stitched together with internal AI tooling: hybrid estates with a lot more in-house tooling doing the stitching, all the bits none of the vendors do, the seams between systems where things fall down, the process, the governance. I think that will accelerate.

Consulting and accounting firms will get hit from multiple ends. There’s PE and roll-up activity in accounting, and it will continue. If firms can use AI to reduce the cost of delivering a consultant’s output, there’s a big value multiple in it for the investors. But think also about the tax partners who’ve run advisory practices for a long time. They’re going to come under pressure and really transform. It will be hard for a tax practice at a Big Four or an accounting firm not to have a technology aspect anymore. And the moat advisers have around indemnity, the old line about nobody ever getting fired for hiring IBM, is a big part of what you buy when you buy advice. I think technology will figure that out at some point, or maybe it won’t be worth as much as it was, because of the way people get information and interact with authorities.

Legislation will change too. I was talking to someone about agentic commerce, and they were way too smart for me, but the question is who’s doing the buying, and where are they? Everything you base a tax decision on becomes opaque, with all the systems involved. I don’t think legislators will be able to keep up, so there’ll be a Wild West for a good few years while they work it out.

I don’t know if anything stays the same. I think we’ll still be talking about harmonisation in the EU, and still doing things differently. That might be a cop-out, but I don’t see the authorities coming together.

“I don’t think all of a sudden everyone’s just going to say, we’re just going to adopt a common standard.”

Russell: Too easy. It would put some of us out of a job. We need the annoying complexities to prove we’re a little bit different, a little bit special.

Paul: Exactly. And I think we’ll still have different and special people in tax tech for a long time. The innovation and the community won’t change either. I still hope to be going to conferences in five years and seeing the same people, maybe talking about different stuff. There’ll be continuity, and really smart, motivated people driving the agenda across legislation, the vendor landscape and in-house.

The full conversation is on [Podcast name]: [LINK].

A selection of of opportunities to connect in person and interact online over the next few weeks.

SEPTEMBER 2026

E-Invoicing Exchange Summit 2026 (Conference)

E-Invoicing Exchange | 30 September – 2 October 2026 | Hotel MOA Berlin, Berlin, Germany

The leading independent e-invoicing industry event returns to Berlin, bringing together enterprises, tax authorities, and technology providers to share insights on cross-border interoperability, regulatory readiness, and the growing impact of AI on e-invoicing and tax processes.

Event Page →

OCTOBER 2026

ITR AI in Tax Forum 2026 — Middle East (Conference)

International Tax Review | 6 October 2026 | Dubai, UAE

Event Page →

Digital Accountancy Show 2026 (Conference)

Easyfairs / Digital Accountancy | 7–8 October 2026 | ExCeL London, London, UK

Event Page →

Join PwC and Meridian to Discuss Navigating the Future of Tax Compliance (Roundtable)

PwC / Meridian Global Services | 8 October 2026, 13:30–17:30 | PwC Amsterdam Offices, Thomas R. Malthusstraat 5, Amsterdam, Netherlands

An in-person roundtable bringing together finance, tax, and IT leaders to discuss the future of tax compliance, indirect tax automation, and readiness for evolving mandates.

Event Page →

Power of 3: PwC, SAP & Vertex (Roundtable)

PwC / SAP / Vertex | 15 October 2026 | TBC

TEI Annual Conference 2026 (Conference)

TEI — Tax Executives Institute | 21 October 2026 | Grand Hyatt Nashville, Nashville, TN

5th Annual VAT Compliance and Indirect Tax Forum 2026 — ITX (Conference)

Amistat Group | 21–22 October 2026 | Van der Valk Hotel, Brussels, Belgium

Event Page →

IVA Autumn Conference 2026 (Conference)

International VAT Association (IVA) | 22–23 October 2026 | Marseille, France

Event Page →

ITR AI in Tax Forum 2026 — USA (Conference)

International Tax Review | 26 October 2026 | New York, USA

Event Page →

E-Rechnungs-Gipfel 2026 — Repeat Edition (Conference)

Vereon AG / E-Invoicing Exchange Summit | 26–27 October 2026 | Frankfurt am Main, Germany

Event Page →

*any organisers or events I’ve missed? please let me know.

A curated selection of blogs, white-papers and on demand content published by multiple organisartions across the landscape, organised into a themed learning path.

SEPTEMBER 2026

E-Invoicing, Direct Tax, Pillar Two & Synthesis

September covers the live mandate wave — France’s CTC goes mandatory this month — alongside Pillar Two post-filing analysis, corporate tax provision, and a synthesis capstone. Each week maintains the cross-theme mix, combining e-invoicing, direct tax, and operational content.

Week 1 · 7–11 September

The Live Mandate Wave: France, Slovakia, CTC Foundations & the Global Picture

📖Continuous Transaction Controls: The Future of Compliance Sovos12–15 min

📖Global VAT Guide: July 2026 VATupdate / Fintua 10–15 min

📖Sovos TaxScapes Q1 2026: France CTC Pilot, KSeF & Norway Acceleration Sovos 12–15 min

📖5 Things We Can Learn from Belgium’s 2026 E-Invoicing Mandate Innovate Tax 8–10 min

🎥E-Invoicing Trends and Obligations: 2026 and Beyond (feat. Forrester) Comarch / Forrester 60 min

🎥Countdown to Slovakia 2027: Preparing for Mandatory E-Invoicing and Digital Reporting Sovos 45–60 min

Week total: 4 articles + 2 webinars · ~147–175 min (~2.5 hrs)

Week 2 · 14–18 September

ViDA, Platform Architecture & Emerging Markets

📖What is ViDA? VAT in the Digital Age Initiative Q&APagero (Thomson Reuters) 12–15 min

📖Streamline the Future #6: Reporting Built for Global E-Invoicing Operations Comarch 8–10 min

📖Brazil 2026 Tax Reform: Key E-Invoicing Changes Fonoa 10–12 min

📖Leading the Charge: E-Invoicing as the Cornerstone of Future Compliance Vertex Inc. 10–12 min

📖E-Invoicing Transformation: How to Get It Right Pagero (Thomson Reuters) 10–12 min

📖E-Invoicing in Norway and Latest European VAT Updates Marosa VAT 8–10 min

🎥E-Invoicing in Eastern Europe: KSeF, ViDA, Romania, Hungary & BeyondP agero (Thomson Reuters) 45 min

Week total: 2 articles + 1 webinar · ~103–116 min (~1.75 hrs)

Week 3 · 21–25 September

Pillar Two, GIR Filing & the Side-by-Side Package

📖Orbitax Launches Global Pillar Two Compliance Accelerator Orbitax 10–12 min

📖Global Minimum Tax and the Data Management Dilemma Thomson Reuters / Orbitax 10–12 min

📖OECD Side-by-Side Package: Relief for US Multinationals RSM US 12–15 min

📖The New Pillar Two Framework: Unboxing the Side-by-Side Package Alvarez & Marsal 15–18 min

🎥Pillar Two Compliance: Grant Thornton & Orbitax Strategies Orbitax / Grant Thornton 60 min · CPE

🎥Seamless Tax Data Integration: From Any System to Pillar Two Compliance Orbitax / Deloitte 45–60 min

Week total: 4 articles + 2 webinars · ~152–177 min (~2.5 hrs)

Week 4· 28 September – 2 October (Capstone)

Provision, Maturity, US Tax Landscape & Full Synthesis

📖QDMTT: Stay Ahead of the Global Minimum Tax Curve Orbitax (Thomson Reuters) 12–15 min

📖How to Build a Winning Indirect Tax Maturity Roadmap Fonoa 12–15 min

📖The Future of Indirect Tax: 3 Traits Every Modern Tax Team Needs Fonoa 8–10 min

📖2025 Tax Recap & 2026 Preview: OBBBA Compliance UpdatesWolters Kluwer / CCH 8–10 min

📖2025 Tax Recap and 2026 Preview for Accounting Firms Wolters Kluwer / CCH 10–12 min

📖AI-Enabled Tax Transformation Deloitte Global 20–25 min

🎥Taking Corporate Tax Management Beyond Provision with Longview insightsoftware / International Tax Review 60 min

Week total: 6 articles + 1 webinar · ~130–147 min (~2.25 hrs)

September total: 20 articles + 6 webinars = 26 resources · ~532–615 min (~8.5–10 hrs)

*any cool content I’ve missed? please let me know.

A selection of open roles across tax tech vendors and tax advisory/consulting businesses who are involved in tax technology.

In house roles are provided courtesy of the smart people at https://taxjobs.ai

Use the column headers to sort, or the search function and don’t forget to navigate all pages! And feel free to share the love on socials.

*I do this using an AI agent and due to the volume, I don’t check every link, so please let me know if any of these don’t work or have disappeared when you follow them.

Want to go deeper? Let’s chat

For Buyers - bespoke vendor analysis, comparisons, tailored market research and vendor selection

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The Nexus Issue 24: E-Invoicing in the UAE

Nexus Tax Technology — Fri, 18 Sep 2026 11:31:36 GMT

What’s happening in the latest IDC Marketscape report

In major taxtech news this week SOVOS acquired Blue Dot, reversing the market trend of VAT recovery businesses like VATIT and Fintua, building VAT compliance and E-invoicing SaaS suites. I’ll be doing a deeper analysis on this in the coming weeks.

Now to this week’s feature as we zoom in on the vendor landscape in the latest CTC hotspot, the United Arab Emeriates.

🌍 Feature: Navigating the United Arab Emirates E-invoicing Vendor Lanscape

Behind Every UAE ASP, Another ASP

Two hundred vendors, four tiers of truth, and the six-step sequence that gets you through the mandate without buying the wrong layer.

Two hundred vendors just showed up for one deadline. Most of them didn’t build what they’re selling.

Businesses with AED 50m+ revenue have until 30 October 2026 to appoint an Accredited Service Provider. Full compliance lands 1 January 2027. Smaller businesses phase in through the rest of the year. The market has responded the way markets always respond to a hard regulatory deadline: fast, crowded, and confusing. taxtech500’s Top 200 UAE E-invoicing directory is the best public map of that crowd — and read correctly, it tells a very different story than the one it thinks it’s telling.

The real segmentation isn’t six categories. It’s four tiers.

Taxtech500 sorts the market into six categories: tax compliance software, automation software, consultancy, ERP integration, implementation partners, SME accounting. That’s a fine map of what a vendor sells. It’s a poor map of what you’re actually exposed to, because the report itself admits the load-bearing fact: a significant share of the 200 are not accredited ASPs at all. Many sit on top of someone else’s Peppol infrastructure — some openly, some white-labelled so cleanly you’d never know.

That single fact matters more than any category tag. So we re-sorted the market on a different axis: how directly does this vendor sit behind the FTA’s Access Point?

Tier 1 — Direct ASP. Runs its own Access Point. Self-declared, MoF accredited or pre-approved. e.g. SAP, Avalara.
Tier 2 — Disclosed partner. Doesn’t claim accreditation, but its category structurally admits it isn’t the ASP — ERP integrators, implementation partners, SME accounting platforms. e.g. Xero, NTT DATA.
Tier 3 — Undisclosed / ambiguous. Markets itself as a compliance or automation platform. Doesn’t claim accreditation. Doesn’t disclose a partner either. You genuinely cannot tell from the listing. e.g. Coupa, Tradeshift.
Tier 4 — Advisory only. No transmission technology. Guidance, impact assessment, change management. e.g. Deloitte, PwC Middle East.

Direct, self-declared accreditation is the smallest bucket in the market, not the largest.

What each tier actually exposes you to

Every tier trades a benefit for a risk. None of them is a free lunch — including the one that looks safest on paper.

Tier 1 — Direct ASP. The benefit is the shortest possible chain of accountability: one contract, one entity legally on the hook when an invoice fails validation, a direct line to the FTA with nothing in between. The risk is narrower than it looks — accreditation is a point-in-time claim, not a permanent state, and a UAE-only build wearing a global-sounding name may carry less multi-jurisdiction depth than the marketing implies. Verify the claim is current, not just present.

Tier 2 — Disclosed partner. The benefit is honesty by construction, and often real convenience: the vendor is usually a platform you already have a relationship with — your ERP reseller, your accounting software, your project delivery partner — so there’s no new vendor-management overhead to absorb. The risk is the extra hop itself: if the ASP sitting behind them has an outage, loses accreditation, or changes commercial terms, you inherit that risk with less visibility and less leverage than if you’d contracted with the ASP directly.

Tier 3 — Undisclosed / ambiguous. There’s no clean benefit here by design — but pragmatically, these are often the most feature-rich platforms on the list, bundling AP/AR automation, analytics and multi-country compliance into one product, so if it works, you get more than a bare invoice connection. The risk is that you cannot assess your own dependency chain from the outside. If something breaks during go-live, you don’t know in advance whether the vendor or whoever’s Access Point they’re quietly sitting on is the one responsible for fixing it.

Tier 4 — Advisory only. The benefit is real expertise in exactly the problem a mandate like this creates internally — impact assessment, stakeholder alignment, change management across finance and IT — which is a genuinely different skill from running compliant infrastructure. The risk is that they carry zero technology accountability by definition, and a number of firms in this tier hold referral or commission arrangements with specific ASPs, which can quietly shape which vendor they end up recommending. Ask directly before assuming the recommendation is neutral.

Tier 3 isn’t a red flag on any one vendor — it’s a gap in the marketing copy that’s yours to close.

Two markets colliding inside one directory

Roughly two-thirds of the 200 are UAE-headquartered. The remaining third splits mostly between India and the US, with a smaller European cluster — and that third is where the household names live. SAP, Avalara, Sovos, Coupa, Tradeshift, Basware, Comarch and Wolters Kluwer are the same names anchoring the broader ~$7–10B+ global indirect tax technology market, extending an existing platform into PINT-AE coverage. Set against that: close to one in six entries with a founding date on record were established in just the last three years, squarely because of the mandate. Two different kinds of vendor, two different risk profiles, one directory that doesn’t flag the difference.

Dealing with a global major carries its own trade-off. The benefit is institutional weight: a platform that’s already survived EU VAT in the Digital Age, Saudi’s ZATCA mandate, or a dozen other CTC rollouts elsewhere is unlikely to vanish mid-contract, and usually arrives with support infrastructure built for scale. The cost is attention. UAE is one jurisdiction among dozens on their roadmap, which means local PINT-AE nuance, UAE-specific support depth, and how fast they respond to an FTA guidance change can all lag a business that was built for nothing else.

A UAE-native, mandate-driven entrant flips that trade-off. The benefit is focus: a platform built specifically for PINT-AE and the DCTCE model from day one, often with faster local support and a genuine incentive to prove itself while the market is still forming. The cost is unproven longevity — a company founded in 2025 for a 2027 deadline has no track record surviving a renewal cycle, let alone the next regulatory shift, and a thin team means less resilience if key people leave or the business gets folded into a larger platform mid-contract. This is exactly why the same tier label can mean different things depending on which cohort it’s attached to: a Tier 3 global major is ambiguous about UAE accreditation because UAE is one listing among dozens on a much bigger site — the company itself isn’t going anywhere, so the real question is how deep its UAE-specific investment actually runs. A Tier 3 UAE-native entrant carries a different risk stack entirely — the ambiguity might mean accreditation genuinely isn’t finished yet, or that they’re quietly routing through a partner while they wait, and if it’s also a business with no track record before 2024, you’re stacking accreditation risk directly on top of longevity risk. Same tier label. Different question to ask.

The buyer’s decision sequence

Knowing the tiers exist doesn’t tell you what to do Monday morning. Here’s the sequence, in order.

1. Map your footprint before you look at a single vendor. Count your ERPs, your legal entities, and check your revenue against the AED 50m threshold — that alone determines your compliance date. Note any jurisdictions you operate in beyond the UAE. This single step rules out three of the six categories before you’ve read a single pitch: a single-entity SME on one accounting platform has no business evaluating an implementation partner built for multi-ERP estates, and vice versa.

2. Set your tier floor before you’re charmed by a demo. Decide, in writing, how much Tier 3 ambiguity your risk appetite will actually accept — before you’re in a sales call. A regulated, high-volume, audit-intensive business should set the floor at Tier 1, or a Tier 2 vendor whose named underlying ASP you’ve independently verified. A low-volume SME may reasonably accept a Tier 3 platform if it’s paired with a Tier 2 or Tier 4 check elsewhere in the process. Set this number first. Vendor charisma has a way of moving it mid-conversation if you don’t.

3. Build a tiered shortlist, two to three names deep. Pull names from the category that matches your footprint, and deliberately include vendors from more than one tier — not three flavours of the same risk. This is where the composite chart above earns its keep: it tells you which categories are safe to shortlist on category alone (ERP integration, implementation partners and SME accounting are 85–92% Tier 2 by construction) and which categories need individual vetting no matter how polished the listing (tax compliance software and automation software, where the ambiguous share runs 71–88%).

4. Send the same five questions to every name on the list, no exceptions. Are you MoF-accredited yourselves, or routing through a partner’s Access Point — and if the latter, who, with accreditation we can check independently? What happens to our invoice flow and archive if that underlying relationship changes? Do you hold a referral, commission, or reseller arrangement tied to whichever ASP or platform you’re recommending? Outside the UAE, are you an established Peppol/CTC operator, or is this the first mandate you’ve built for? If compliance sits inside a broader product, how deep does that layer actually run versus how thin is the wrapper around a third-party connection? Identical questions, every vendor, so the answers are actually comparable — and treat vagueness on question one as an answer in itself.

5. Weight advisory input correctly. If a consultancy is involved, use their output for the impact assessment and the change management sequencing — not as your accreditation verification. Keep the two purchase decisions separate in your budget and your contract, so a referral arrangement can’t quietly re-enter through the back door of “our recommended partner.”

6. Verify, then sign, then verify again. Before the contract is final, check mof.gov.ae directly — regardless of what any vendor, consultancy, or directory (including this one) has told you. Build the 30 October 2026 appointment deadline and the 1 January 2027 compliance date explicitly into the contract’s milestone schedule, not just into the sales deck.

Ask the question the report won’t ask for you: who’s actually running your Access Point?

Quick reference: navigating each category

Tax compliance software — verify accreditation directly at mof.gov.ae; ask whether they run their own Access Point or route through a named partner.
Automation software — push on how deep the compliance layer runs versus how thin the wrapper is around a third-party ASP; a good default only if you already run their AP/AR workflow.
Consultancy — ask about referral arrangements up front; use for change management, not as a substitute for vetting the ASP they recommend.
ERP integration partners — confirm exact version/module coverage; expect to need more than one partner if you run more than one ERP.
Implementation partners — ask who they subcontract to for the platform-specific work; map the timeline explicitly to the mandate’s two key dates.
SME accounting software — most already route through a small number of accredited partners behind the scenes; differentiate on onboarding, support and price, not on which ASP.

The landing punch

Watch the next twelve months for the tell. Expect the global majors to keep quietly acquiring or partnering with the accredited local ASPs sitting underneath the white-label layer — because owning the rails is worth more than owning another logo in a 200-name directory. And expect the buyers who asked the depth question up front to be the ones who aren’t renegotiating their stack in Q2 2027.

Two hundred vendors. One real question. Ask it before you sign.

Graphics and data: The Nexus, from analysis of the taxtech500 Top 200 UAE E-invoicing Service Providers Report 2026. Tier classification is derived from each vendor’s own description text and category tags as published in the report — not verified against the Ministry of Finance’s live accreditation list. Always confirm current status directly at mof.gov.ae.

A selection of of opportunities to connect in person and interact online over the next few weeks.

SEPTEMBER 2026

Avalara CRUSH 2026 (Conference)

Avalara | 22–24 September 2026 | Fort Lauderdale, FL

Avalara’s premier annual conference returns as agentic AI reshapes tax and compliance. A key gathering for finance, tax, and technology professionals exploring the future of automated, AI-powered global tax compliance — with product deep-dives, partner sessions, and peer networking.

InnovAIT 2026 — AIT Annual Conference (Conference)

AIT UK (Accountants in IT) | 23–24 September 2026 | Sofitel London Heathrow T5, London, UK

Brings together IT directors and senior technology leaders from many of the UK’s top accountancy firms for presentations, roundtable discussions, and networking on how firms are adopting AI and automation — relevant context for tax technology stacks sitting inside accounting practices.

Event Page →

E-Invoicing Exchange Summit 2026 (Conference)

E-Invoicing Exchange | 30 September – 2 October 2026 | Hotel MOA Berlin, Berlin, Germany

Event Page →

OCTOBER 2026

ITR AI in Tax Forum 2026 — Middle East (Conference)

International Tax Review | 6 October 2026 | Dubai, UAE

Event Page →

Digital Accountancy Show 2026 (Conference)

Easyfairs / Digital Accountancy | 7–8 October 2026 | ExCeL London, London, UK

Event Page →

Join PwC and Meridian to Discuss Navigating the Future of Tax Compliance (Roundtable)

PwC / Meridian Global Services | 8 October 2026, 13:30–17:30 | PwC Amsterdam Offices, Thomas R. Malthusstraat 5, Amsterdam, Netherlands

An in-person roundtable bringing together finance, tax, and IT leaders to discuss the future of tax compliance, indirect tax automation, and readiness for evolving mandates.

Event Page →

Power of 3: PwC, SAP & Vertex (Roundtable)

PwC / SAP / Vertex | 15 October 2026 | TBC

TEI Annual Conference 2026 (Conference)

TEI — Tax Executives Institute | 21 October 2026 | Grand Hyatt Nashville, Nashville, TN

5th Annual VAT Compliance and Indirect Tax Forum 2026 — ITX (Conference)

Amistat Group | 21–22 October 2026 | Van der Valk Hotel, Brussels, Belgium

Event Page →

IVA Autumn Conference 2026 (Conference)

International VAT Association (IVA) | 22–23 October 2026 | Marseille, France

Event Page →

ITR AI in Tax Forum 2026 — USA (Conference)

International Tax Review | 26 October 2026 | New York, USA

Event Page →

E-Rechnungs-Gipfel 2026 — Repeat Edition (Conference)

Vereon AG / E-Invoicing Exchange Summit | 26–27 October 2026 | Frankfurt am Main, Germany

Event Page →

*any organisers or events I’ve missed? please let me know.

A curated selection of blogs, white-papers and on demand content published by multiple organisartions across the landscape, organised into a themed learning path.

SEPTEMBER 2026

E-Invoicing, Direct Tax, Pillar Two & Synthesis

Week 1 · 7–11 September

The Live Mandate Wave: France, Slovakia, CTC Foundations & the Global Picture

📖Continuous Transaction Controls: The Future of Compliance Sovos12–15 min

📖Global VAT Guide: July 2026 VATupdate / Fintua 10–15 min

📖Sovos TaxScapes Q1 2026: France CTC Pilot, KSeF & Norway Acceleration Sovos 12–15 min

📖5 Things We Can Learn from Belgium’s 2026 E-Invoicing Mandate Innovate Tax 8–10 min

🎥E-Invoicing Trends and Obligations: 2026 and Beyond (feat. Forrester) Comarch / Forrester 60 min

🎥Countdown to Slovakia 2027: Preparing for Mandatory E-Invoicing and Digital Reporting Sovos 45–60 min

Week total: 4 articles + 2 webinars · ~147–175 min (~2.5 hrs)

Week 2 · 14–18 September

ViDA, Platform Architecture & Emerging Markets

📖What is ViDA? VAT in the Digital Age Initiative Q&APagero (Thomson Reuters) 12–15 min

📖Streamline the Future #6: Reporting Built for Global E-Invoicing Operations Comarch 8–10 min

📖Brazil 2026 Tax Reform: Key E-Invoicing Changes Fonoa 10–12 min

📖Leading the Charge: E-Invoicing as the Cornerstone of Future Compliance Vertex Inc. 10–12 min

📖E-Invoicing Transformation: How to Get It Right Pagero (Thomson Reuters) 10–12 min

📖E-Invoicing in Norway and Latest European VAT Updates Marosa VAT 8–10 min

🎥E-Invoicing in Eastern Europe: KSeF, ViDA, Romania, Hungary & BeyondP agero (Thomson Reuters) 45 min

Week total: 2 articles + 1 webinar · ~103–116 min (~1.75 hrs)

Week 3 · 21–25 September

Pillar Two, GIR Filing & the Side-by-Side Package

📖Orbitax Launches Global Pillar Two Compliance Accelerator Orbitax 10–12 min

📖Global Minimum Tax and the Data Management Dilemma Thomson Reuters / Orbitax 10–12 min

📖OECD Side-by-Side Package: Relief for US Multinationals RSM US 12–15 min

📖The New Pillar Two Framework: Unboxing the Side-by-Side Package Alvarez & Marsal 15–18 min

🎥Pillar Two Compliance: Grant Thornton & Orbitax Strategies Orbitax / Grant Thornton 60 min · CPE

🎥Seamless Tax Data Integration: From Any System to Pillar Two Compliance Orbitax / Deloitte 45–60 min

Week total: 4 articles + 2 webinars · ~152–177 min (~2.5 hrs)

Week 4· 28 September – 2 October (Capstone)

Provision, Maturity, US Tax Landscape & Full Synthesis

📖QDMTT: Stay Ahead of the Global Minimum Tax Curve Orbitax (Thomson Reuters) 12–15 min

📖How to Build a Winning Indirect Tax Maturity Roadmap Fonoa 12–15 min

📖The Future of Indirect Tax: 3 Traits Every Modern Tax Team Needs Fonoa 8–10 min

📖2025 Tax Recap & 2026 Preview: OBBBA Compliance UpdatesWolters Kluwer / CCH 8–10 min

📖2025 Tax Recap and 2026 Preview for Accounting Firms Wolters Kluwer / CCH 10–12 min

📖AI-Enabled Tax Transformation Deloitte Global 20–25 min

🎥Taking Corporate Tax Management Beyond Provision with Longview insightsoftware / International Tax Review 60 min

Week total: 6 articles + 1 webinar · ~130–147 min (~2.25 hrs)

September total: 20 articles + 6 webinars = 26 resources · ~532–615 min (~8.5–10 hrs)

*any cool content I’ve missed? please let me know.

A selection of open roles across tax tech vendors and tax advisory/consulting businesses who are involved in tax technology.

In house roles are provided courtesy of the smart people at https://taxjobs.ai

Use the column headers to sort, or the search function and don’t forget to navigate all pages!

*I do this using an AI agent and due to the volume, I don’t check every link, so please let me know if any of these don’t work or have disappeared when you follow them.

Want to go deeper? Let’s chat

For Buyers - bespoke vendor analysis, comparisons, tailored market research and vendor selection

For Vendors - Go To Market analysis, strategy and execution support, interim leadership

Click on the image below

The Nexus Issue 23: Operator Interview with Uber Tax PM

Nexus Tax Technology — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 12:00:57 GMT

The Nexus on Tour: TBM Group Indirect Tax Technology Summit

Two Conferences Happened in the Same Room

This week I had the pleasure of visiting the 10th Annnual strategic indirect tax conference in Amsterdam, courtesy of the fine folks at TBM Group. Now I do recommend getting out there to these events as the network and community is amazing, but for those that couldn’t make it, here’s my take.

Vendor Narrative:

One ran through the vendor slots: future-ready ecosystems, foundations for compliance, a billion invoices as proof of scale. Confident. Architectural. Forward-leaning. In that version, the fix is always a platform.

Sovos framed its slot around building a “future-ready” ecosystem, Vertex pitched master data as the foundation compliance sits on, and Meridian Global Services described the reporting shift as a paradigm to architect for — all three treating the mandate as a design problem with a design answer. Thomson Reuters played the same register from a different angle, positioning itself as interpreter of VIDA rather than seller of a fix, moderating rather than pitching.

A second theme ran alongside it: scale as proof. Marosa by Wolters Kluwer and Comarch spent time across both days on e-invoicing provider models and the trade-offs between them, and Cygnet Infotech built its entire slot around a billion processed invoices — adoption-at-scale doing the persuading instead of a features list.

Customer Narrative:

The customer sessions used that same stage to name friction the vendor sessions mostly skipped. Valentino opened asking who owns this: centralized or not, and whether tax teams actually have the skills for what’s coming. Hitachi Energy picked up the same thread from the other end of the lifecycle, asking who manages the technology once it’s live and calling the onboarding hurdle “not so hidden” — an admission, not a pitch.

A second theme was unresolved exposure. Mercedes-Benz spent its slot on live EU VAT court decisions that no platform resolves. Joseph Ribkoff covered supply chain and geopolitical exposure the tax function has to absorb rather than license away. Revolut worked through the seams between indirect tax, direct tax, and transfer pricing — problems that sit between systems, not inside one.

Where They Complement

Structural agreement. Both sides treat real-time reporting (VIDA, e-invoicing mandates) as a structural shift, not a filing update. Nobody in either camp argued otherwise.
AI skepticism, from both directions. Fonoa’s vendor-side caution and the practitioner “avoid generic outputs” framing point the same way. Vendor and buyer skepticism agreeing is a real market-maturity signal — not just messaging discipline.
Master data as the shared gap. Vertex’s governance pitch and Hitachi Energy’s onboarding admission are two descriptions of the same underlying problem, seen from opposite sides of the sale.

Where They Diverge

Orientation. Vendor sessions sell forward — roadmap, future-ready, scale. Customer sessions talk present-tense — maintenance, ownership, accountability. The agenda reads optimistic in vendor slots and cautious in customer slots, even though both are equally on the program.
Unit of the problem. Vendors diagnose an architecture gap: the right platform fixes it. Customers diagnose an organizational gap: the right operating model, skills, and accountability fix it. Same mandate, different diagnosis.
Lifecycle stage. Vendor programming clusters around build/deploy — strategy, data model, provider selection. Customer programming clusters around live-with-it — disputes, onboarding, cross-border shocks. Together they cover the full lifecycle; neither narrative alone does.

The takeaway: read the vendor narrative for what’s possible. Read the customer narrative for what it takes to run once it’s live and how much it solves. Skip either one, and you’re pricing a platform off half the truth.

Now this week’s feature is one I’ve been looking forward to for ages….

A Product Manager’s View on Vendors, AI, and What Comes Next

Diyan (Diddo) Mihaylov has spent more than four years as a Senior Product Manager on Uber’s FinTech, Tax & Compliance team, covering e-invoicing, indirect tax determination, and reporting for a business that makes over a thousand filings a year across 70+ jurisdictions.

He also writes one of the sharper operator-voice Substacks in tax technology, pairing the mechanics of running tax at enormous scale with a clear-eyed view of where AI is actually changing the work as opposed to where vendor marketing says it is. I sat down with him to talk through where vendors earn their keep and where they don’t, whether value sits in UX or the underlying data layer, whether any vendor can own the tax “OS,” and where he thinks AI is taking tasks, careers, and pricing next.

Paul Guyer: Give us a quick introduction — what do you do at Uber?

Diyan Mihaylov: I’m currently a Senior Product Manager at Uber within the tax domain. I’ve been there a little over four years, joining right around when the company turned profitable — a big deal, but it also meant thinking seriously about tax and the complexity that brings, from Pillar Two to additional reporting. I sit on the teams that handle e-invoicing, indirect taxation, and tax determination: more than a thousand filings each year, across 70+ jurisdictions, for hundreds of Uber entities globally. And the thing that makes this seat different: I sit on the side of the table that creates the tax facts, not the side that reports them. Most people in tax start their story at the trial balance. Mine starts at the transaction, months earlier, in a room where nobody is thinking about VAT yet.

Product Manager vs. Tax Technology Manager

Paul: You’re described as a product manager rather than a tax technology manager. Is that just a technology-company label, or is there a real difference in the discipline?

Diyan: Good question. For at least the past 15 to 20 years, taxation — private and public sector alike — has been handled by complex technology platforms; nobody’s closing books with pen and paper anymore. What’s changed recently is that the authorities moved from reading returns to querying data directly. That forced tax and technology departments in the private sector to develop new roles to adapt and prepare. These developments created two distinct roles: the tax technology manager and the product manager on the tax side.

The tax tech manager is, in most cases, very focused on owning the tools of the tax department — reporting, forecasting, reconciliation. But those tools need to work off something first: data. That’s where the product manager comes in. I make sure the data flows through the right APIs, schemas, data contracts, stable deployments, and acceptable latency. What’s more, since our tax determination workflows are intertwined with checkout, we also need redundancies built in for transient errors that may interfere with the normal use of the Uber app. I am monitoring those constantly.

Paul: And with that, you get other skills and capabilities developing alongside it, right?

Diyan: Exactly. The tax tech manager is strong on knowing the right answer — is this audit-defensible, is the tax calculated correctly. The product manager focuses on whether the master data management and schema are right, and whether the APIs and tax determination flows work as expected. The two roles complement each other.

Thinking in Flows, Not Tools

Paul: Sounds like a broader role in scope. What does the stack actually look like in your world — it’s not just vendor components, there’s a lot of internal plumbing too?

Diyan: The best way to illustrate this is to think in terms of flows rather than tools and software — it gives a much better picture of the whole process. You start with the transaction: every time someone takes an Uber, money moves, and you’re plugging in tax determination and document issuance, standing in the critical path of the transaction being executed correctly and promptly. From there you have the components — vendor or internal — handling tax determination, invoice format, and document templates. Around all of that sits monitoring, latency, stability, reliability, PagerDuty — everything that keeps the process working.

And it’s worth being precise about the layers, because they aren’t equally served. Transaction origination, master and reference data, data staging, lineage and defence — those four, nobody sells and nobody really owns. Determination and filing are the two commercially mature layers, and they’re the two that were already fine.

Where Vendors Earn Their Keep — and Where They Fall Short

Paul: I came up on the vendor side, where the pitch was always to own the end-to-end process — calculation and filing, then e-invoicing in the middle too. Vendors want to be as sticky and embedded as possible. Where do they do a good job supporting the environment you’ve described, and where are they falling short?

Diyan: I recently read the results of a survey of 170 tax leaders published by the Thomson Reuters Institute. It said that 51% of corporate tax departments have bought no new tax technology in the last twelve months, and dissatisfaction with their current tech stack went from 34% to 56% in two years. This strongly suggests people stopped buying because their last purchase didn’t do what they expected.

Vendors are part and parcel of making this successful, and we work with many of them. One strong area is local context — monitoring regulatory changes, much of it automated now, sourced from vendors with significant local presence, because if you’re not present locally, you can’t get ahead of these changes. E-invoicing is another strong area, again because connecting to government technology platforms isn’t trivial — in many jurisdictions you need someone showing up and speaking Arabic or Spanish to the government’s tech team, not something a company handling e-invoicing centrally from one office can achieve. Tax determination is similar: rates change constantly, and without local context it’s hard to keep up.

“Right now, there’s no vendor that provides an end-to-end platform we can immediately internalise — it’s more that we use components.”

Where I see vendors struggle — and where the solutions often aren’t what I’d expect — is when a vendor has to tackle a very complex entity structure, like Uber’s or similar companies’, where business models include different types of money movement. Vendor product taxonomies are often too rigid to accommodate that. I think that’s expected, though — if I were a vendor, I’d build for the standard use case to grow the business, not build my solution to serve two companies in the world.

Paul: Well — yes and no. I think you build for your ICP, and if your ICP is complex multinational organisations with difficult structures and large entity groups and different models, then that’s what you build for. So selling to a thousand companies that look like Uber is a different build entirely. But you’re also fair that you start with something that works and build on it — maybe those are just edge cases.

Diyan: Yes, I think that’s fair.

Paul: From a flow perspective — a process touching internal apps and two or three external vendors — do vendors serve that whole business process well, or just their own narrow slice?

Diyan: When I look at vendors, I try to understand what they’re really good at, and where we need to build together or where there’s uncertainty — that’s how I evaluate what to use. Right now, there’s no vendor that provides an end-to-end platform we can immediately internalise; it’s more that we use components. Another weakness, especially with new AI tools, is audit trail and defensibility. And the reason that matters more every year is what’s happening on the other side of the table. HMRC has a ten-year contract with Quantexa to build one resolved view of every taxpayer from its own systems. The IRS runs Palantir’s SNAP across more than 100 legacy databases. So the basic question for any vendor pitching AI-driven reconciliation is: can I track back which model was used, what decision was made, who confirmed it? That’s where things get complicated, and the solutions are still in their infancy. Especially because according to Vertex’s July 2026 research, 80% of enterprises say they only get to audit readiness through significant manual effort.

Paul: And then it’s a black box, isn’t it. There was always a discussion, from the vendor side, about how defensible that decisioning actually was — you want to automate it, but someone still needs to be able to unpick it and stand by it.

The UX Debate: Will Agents Replace the Reporting Interface?

Paul: I want to push on the UX side of this specifically, because last year I screened a number of solutions for VAT reporting.

Diyan: What I noticed is there’s a heavy emphasis on UI — integrating bots into the UI, into reporting, and so on. What I felt was missing is that I think we’ll switch to agentic workflows, so you won’t need to go and look into a report and decide and understand where things don’t reconcile. Agents would actually look at the data and just give you the outcome: this doesn’t reconcile, and here’s why. What I see right now, in a lot of cases, is still heavy on UI — you open a report in Tableau, or maybe Looker Studio, or Excel, and just try to eyeball it. But I think these kinds of operations are getting moved away to agents, because they’re fairly deterministic, with a fairly high probability of human error ((He’s written the long version of this argument here). Also, I am tracking these trends through research and reports. Deloitte’s Tax Transformation Trends found that 46% of enterprises have already put AI-driven tax analysis into their ERP, and another 44% plan to. That’s happening in their own ERP, not in the tax vendor’s platform.

“[e-Invoice] Transmission itself is viewed as commoditised, like email.”

Paul: Interesting, because I’ve long felt the VAT reporting end game was never really a UX around a reporting product — it was the logic and authority information, callable by whatever user process was happening, SAP or Oracle or a marketplace. All you wanted was the return and a process to check and approve it. With e-invoicing, vendors are building for the next mandate — the next France, the next UAE — because the perceived value is in seeing your return compiled from your invoices as issued and reconciled against what’s transmitted. Transmission itself is viewed as commoditised, like email. So vendors are betting on the UX: housing compliance and returns data alongside e-invoicing and determination data. What’s interesting is that value might diminish as agentic workflows take over that eyeballing work.

Diyan: Yes — one change I’ve noticed is that it’s become fairly easy to build these e-invoicing integrations as a vendor now, because governments have standardised their setups via APIs, and you now have agents that can actually go and build these integrations, including handling scale. It’s no longer the complex, almost unimaginable task that somebody had to handle and that you’d pay a lot of money for. It’s genuinely getting commoditised, and I don’t think, at least in my opinion, companies will be willing to pay a lot of money for it going forward.

Paul: And I agree — vendors have rightly detected this and are moving into adjacent areas horizontally: VAT reporting, reconciliation, and so on.

Diyan: Of course, you then have all sorts of other challenges there, because VAT reporting is also master data management and data quality management, which right now is a little bit difficult for vendors to do well. But I also feel that with the advancement of AI, this area will become fairly easy to handle too. It will be very common in the next two or three years to have this as part of the package you buy from a vendor. I’m just not sure companies will be willing to pay so much for it — but we’ll see.

Can Any Vendor Own the Tax Data Layer?

Paul: One more on vendors before we move to AI. The other trend I see, from the bigger multi-product vendors, is wanting to be the data layer, the data lake — the OS for tax. On the indirect side there’s this notion of a tax data warehouse, aggregating as a byproduct of the transactional work. Can any one vendor really claim to do that, or is it too broad for a single platform to provide, and does it have to be built and operated yourself?

Diyan: I think it depends. In mid-market, there could well be demand for someone, or for such a platform, that you could hand your tax processes to — why not? But when you’re a company thinking about one of your core processes, taxation, you always have to think about what happens if there’s uncertainty. Vendors carry their own uncertainty too, in terms of business and a lot of things. So I’d say I don’t see this happening soon, just because it wouldn’t be very comfortable, at least in my opinion, to fully outsource this core process to a vendor, for many reasons. But second, I think there are some purely technological challenges to doing this, and also business challenges — we already talked about plugging tax determination, e-invoicing, or other flows into your transactions. The obvious question then is: if a company like Uber does millions of transactions, would the vendor’s engine actually be able to reliably carry that challenge successfully?

Paul: And if the answer is no, you have a problem.

Diyan: Say you outsource something — like tax document issuance. You have one of your customers, say a business that receives invoices, and some of those invoices need to be credited and reissued for various reasons — this is common. If you’ve outsourced tax operations, you have to refer that customer to the vendor’s support team. Would the vendor’s support team have the capability and the specialisation required to handle that? The support team needs to understand how the business operations of a company like Uber, or any other company, actually work in order to provide good support. And as a vendor, you have to do this at scale, for every customer — it could be Uber, it could be a bank, it could be a car company.

Paul: So it’s a business challenge to actually be able to fully be the platform.

Diyan: Right — so to me, all of these challenges are unresolved at the moment. I think vendors win more by being specialised in the components they excel at, like we discussed, rather than trying to handle all of that business complexity by being the entire platform for any one company — except maybe if you’re relatively mid-market, where these challenges are much smaller than if you’re in enterprise, let alone large enterprise like Uber, Google, or Apple.

Paul: The support point really drove it home — that scope of understanding is too much to expect from a vendor’s customer success organisation. Makes a lot of sense.

What AI Is Actually Doing in Tax Right Now

Paul: You’re very fluent in AI developments. A lot of vendor messaging is all AI-first, agents, and so on — but vendors worry their value proposition is being eroded, and people in industry worry their boss expects multi-agent systems already. So what work is AI really doing in a tax department right now, and where’s it adding value?

Diyan: I think it’s too early to say what roles AI might be replacing, because I see the conversation really being centred on roles right now. Every day the PMs are gone, and the next day they’re back. Same with tax managers — gone, back, gone, back. The more important conversation is what tasks AI is replacing, not what roles. I already see this at Uber: AI helps a lot with high-volume, deterministic tasks where the check is easy — a number below a threshold, raise an alert. Cheap for an agent to do at scale, better and more cheaply than a person. So, I can’t say AI does Uber’s tax end-to-end. It’s doing a handful of tasks that tax people were doing by hand. Besides, EY has put the share of tax function time spent on gathering and transforming data at 40 to 60%. So, I would aim AI at this layer right now. That covers generating drafts, troubleshooting, research, and preparing an initial reconciliation ahead of monthly close. I’m working on the troubleshooting piece with agents right now, and it’s showing real promise.

“The more important conversation is what tasks AI is replacing, not what roles.”

What isn’t going away is human judgment before you report. The guidance from tax authorities around the world — the IRS, HMRC, Australia, Singapore — says the same thing: if you submit something AI-prepared and it’s not accurate, you’re liable. You can’t say “AI did it.” Verification, signing your name to the filing — that’s not going away.

One thing that genuinely worries me: a lot of my basic skills came from simple tasks. Checking a spreadsheet for errors isn’t strategic work, but it builds reasoning and teaches you how things work — that foundation prepares you for the next level, acting on what the spreadsheet told you. I’m not sure how that judgment gets built into teams over the next five to ten years if the foundational tasks disappear first.

Paul: That’s spoken about a lot with AI and job replacement — it’s taking out the bottom layer. Same in tax and accounting: you cut your teeth on the simple, repeatable work to build a foundation for the harder stuff. I completely agree.

Diyan: I honestly don’t know how that resolves, or what our kids will do coming out of university — it’s concerning. There’s a phenomenon I’ve been reading about, cognitive surrender, which I’ve seen firsthand: people using AI so much they stop reasoning and just execute whatever the prompt result says. That’s dangerous in a deterministic field like finance, but personally too.

Paul: You detach from reality and just carry out instructions, because you don’t understand the process that got you there. I’m the same — I could automate certain home tasks, but I like doing them myself so I understand what I’m looking at.

Where This Goes Next

Paul: So, where do you see tax tech heading over the next couple of years?

Diyan: Well, first, everyone agrees we’re on the verge of a major acceleration. In the same Thomson Reuters survey, 39% of tax departments expect AI to be central to their operations within one to two years. The year before, the consensus answer was three to five.

Now look at how the same departments describe their own maturity. The share calling themselves chaotic or reactive went up, from 57% to 64%. The proactive group shrank, from 35% to 29%. So the expectation curve is going up while the readiness curve is going down. AI is arriving into tax departments that are less organised than they were two years ago, not more — and AI doesn’t fix a messy process, it runs it faster. Nobody is telling that story, because it doesn’t sell anything.

I think that’s also the honest explanation for the dissatisfaction number I mentioned earlier. It isn’t only that the products underdelivered. A lot of them were installed on top of data and processes that weren’t ready.

“AI is arriving into tax departments that got less mature, not more.”

The compliance layer — vendor or internal — will become more commoditised because it will be easier to build. The teams you currently need for government invoicing integrations will probably shrink to a third of the size within a couple of years, and it won’t stay a competitive advantage for one company. Outside jurisdictions requiring a certified provider, mid-market and above will find it fairly easy to integrate directly with governments. That puts real pressure on pricing. I also suspect a move toward success-based pricing — per successful filing or outcome rather than per seat or transaction. Sit down with an LLM and you could spend a lot of time and money accomplishing a task or accomplishing no task at all, which I think is one of the risks.

Paul: Exactly, accomplishing nothing and still spending money.

Diyan: Gartner puts at least 40% of enterprise SaaS spend on usage, agent, or outcome-based pricing by 2030. Even the model providers are moving in this direction. I wouldn’t be surprised if tax tech customers start asking for the same: pay per successful VAT return, or per pound recovered.

I also think a new product category is coming: a layer around defensibility and audit trails — a tax-tech harness. With AI you need robust, specialised audit trails, and I don’t think Anthropic or OpenAI can build those for every industry using their models. There’s room for companies that specialise in exactly that.

On the human side, a lot of roles will keep moving upstream, away from routine work toward strategic work and orchestration.

Paul: Though it’s hard to do orchestration and strategy well without having gone through the basics.

Diyan: You have to be in the trenches and start from there, rather than trying to be on the hill conducting the battle when you’ve never had that experience.

Advice for Building a Career in Tax Tech

Paul: Do you have any advice for people trying to navigate their careers in this industry over the next few years?

Diyan: Beyond getting experience upstream, into orchestration rather than basic operations, get very proficient with the data layer — that matters regardless of which tools or LLMs come and go. If you don’t understand the data model, how to enforce data quality, how to connect it to the reporting layer, you’ll struggle. That’s a genuinely competitive skill right now.

“You have to be in the trenches and start from there, rather than trying to be on the hill conducting the battle when you’ve never had that experience.”

I’d also advise moving toward building rather than process. Building something that solves a problem is valued more right now than managing teams or producing reports, because the process itself, and who executes it, is going to change.

And get good at working with probabilistic systems — the tools with AI built in. A lot of these can’t give you a fully certain outcome; you’re always dealing with probability. If you ask an AI to do a reconciliation, the real question is whether the outcome is correct with high confidence, and judging that means understanding these systems well enough to set the right threshold: high confidence, use it as-is; low confidence, a human needs to look.

Paul: Right now, we’re the algorithm, in a sense — you check something and decide it’s not correct without needing to label your own confidence. When an agent does the checking, you’re on the outside trying to work out if it’s telling the truth or just falsely confident.

Diyan: And that’s a whole new area for everyone to learn. Understanding the tools and how they work — that’s really the point.

Paul: That’s been brilliant, thank you. Last thing — a quick plug for your Substack. What can people expect to see from you there?

Diyan: I generally write about the challenges I face every day dealing with tax, but also try to think strategically about where it will be in a couple of years and how it might get solved — it’s a way for me to understand how things are developing. If people want to know more about doing tax at really large scale, that’s the place to look.

Want to read more, you can speak to Diyan here and I highly recommend his substack, which I’ve linked here amd below:

A selection of of opportunities to connect in person and interact online over the next few weeks.

SEPTEMBER 2026

Shared Services & Outsourcing Week 2026 — Autumn (Conference)

SSON — Shared Services & Outsourcing Network | 14–17 September 2026 | San Diego, CA

SSON’s autumn flagship conference covering finance, tax, HR, and IT shared services transformation, with a focus on AI adoption, automation, and the future of the GBS operating model.

Tax Should Be at the Table from Day One: An S/4HANA & Indirect Tax Leadership Event (Roundtable)

EY / Meridian / Jaguar Land Rover / SAP | 16 September 2026, 2:30–5:45pm | London Bridge Office, London, UK

An exclusive in-person leadership session exploring why tax should be involved from the outset of an S/4HANA programme, the role of accurate data in indirect tax transformation, the latest SAP innovations in this space, and Jaguar Land Rover's own S/4HANA tax determination story. Designed for indirect tax leaders, tax technology and transformation leaders, and project leads on tax technology or S/4HANA programmes. Free to attend; registration required — contact Ruby Buckland directly.
Event Page → (no public registration link — contact Ruby Buckland, EY via LinkedIn)

Avalara CRUSH 2026 (Conference)

Avalara | 22–24 September 2026 | Fort Lauderdale, FL

E-Invoicing Exchange Summit 2026 (Conference)

E-Invoicing Exchange | 30 September – 2 October 2026 | Hotel MOA Berlin, Berlin, Germany

Event Page →

OCTOBER 2026

Join PwC and Meridian to Discuss Navigating the Future of Tax Compliance (Roundtable)

PwC / Meridian Global Services | 8 October 2026, 13:30–17:30 | PwC Amsterdam Offices, Thomas R. Malthusstraat 5, Amsterdam, Netherlands

An in-person roundtable bringing together finance, tax, and IT leaders to discuss the future of tax compliance, indirect tax automation, and readiness for evolving mandates.

Event Page →

Power of 3: PwC, SAP & Vertex (Roundtable)

PwC / SAP / Vertex | 15 October 2026 | TBC

TEI Annual Conference 2026 (Conference)

TEI — Tax Executives Institute | 21 October 2026 | Grand Hyatt Nashville, Nashville, TN

5th Annual VAT Compliance and Indirect Tax Forum 2026 — ITX (Conference)

Amistat Group | 21–22 October 2026 | Van der Valk Hotel, Brussels, Belgium

Event Page →

IVA Autumn Conference 2026 (Conference)

International VAT Association (IVA) | 22–23 October 2026 | Marseille, France

Event Page →

ITR AI in Tax Forum 2026 — USA (Conference)

International Tax Review | 26 October 2026 | New York, USA

Event Page →

E-Rechnungs-Gipfel 2026 — Repeat Edition (Conference)

Vereon AG / E-Invoicing Exchange Summit | 26–27 October 2026 | Frankfurt am Main, Germany

Event Page →

*any organisers or events I’ve missed? please let me know.

A curated selection of blogs, white-papers and on demand content published by multiple organisartions across the landscape, organised into a themed learning path.

SEPTEMBER 2026

E-Invoicing, Direct Tax, Pillar Two & Synthesis

Week 1 · 7–11 September

The Live Mandate Wave: France, Slovakia, CTC Foundations & the Global Picture

📖Continuous Transaction Controls: The Future of Compliance Sovos12–15 min

📖Global VAT Guide: July 2026 VATupdate / Fintua 10–15 min

📖Sovos TaxScapes Q1 2026: France CTC Pilot, KSeF & Norway Acceleration Sovos 12–15 min

📖5 Things We Can Learn from Belgium’s 2026 E-Invoicing Mandate Innovate Tax 8–10 min

🎥E-Invoicing Trends and Obligations: 2026 and Beyond (feat. Forrester) Comarch / Forrester 60 min

🎥Countdown to Slovakia 2027: Preparing for Mandatory E-Invoicing and Digital Reporting Sovos 45–60 min

Week total: 4 articles + 2 webinars · ~147–175 min (~2.5 hrs)

Week 2 · 14–18 September

ViDA, Platform Architecture & Emerging Markets

📖What is ViDA? VAT in the Digital Age Initiative Q&APagero (Thomson Reuters) 12–15 min

📖Streamline the Future #6: Reporting Built for Global E-Invoicing Operations Comarch 8–10 min

📖Brazil 2026 Tax Reform: Key E-Invoicing Changes Fonoa 10–12 min

📖Leading the Charge: E-Invoicing as the Cornerstone of Future Compliance Vertex Inc. 10–12 min

📖E-Invoicing Transformation: How to Get It Right Pagero (Thomson Reuters) 10–12 min

📖E-Invoicing in Norway and Latest European VAT Updates Marosa VAT 8–10 min

🎥E-Invoicing in Eastern Europe: KSeF, ViDA, Romania, Hungary & BeyondP agero (Thomson Reuters) 45 min

Week total: 2 articles + 1 webinar · ~103–116 min (~1.75 hrs)

Week 3 · 21–25 September

Pillar Two, GIR Filing & the Side-by-Side Package

📖Orbitax Launches Global Pillar Two Compliance Accelerator Orbitax 10–12 min

📖Global Minimum Tax and the Data Management Dilemma Thomson Reuters / Orbitax 10–12 min

📖OECD Side-by-Side Package: Relief for US Multinationals RSM US 12–15 min

📖The New Pillar Two Framework: Unboxing the Side-by-Side Package Alvarez & Marsal 15–18 min

🎥Pillar Two Compliance: Grant Thornton & Orbitax Strategies Orbitax / Grant Thornton 60 min · CPE

🎥Seamless Tax Data Integration: From Any System to Pillar Two Compliance Orbitax / Deloitte 45–60 min

Week total: 4 articles + 2 webinars · ~152–177 min (~2.5 hrs)

Week 4· 28 September – 2 October (Capstone)

Provision, Maturity, US Tax Landscape & Full Synthesis

📖QDMTT: Stay Ahead of the Global Minimum Tax Curve Orbitax (Thomson Reuters) 12–15 min

📖How to Build a Winning Indirect Tax Maturity Roadmap Fonoa 12–15 min

📖The Future of Indirect Tax: 3 Traits Every Modern Tax Team Needs Fonoa 8–10 min

📖2025 Tax Recap & 2026 Preview: OBBBA Compliance UpdatesWolters Kluwer / CCH 8–10 min

📖2025 Tax Recap and 2026 Preview for Accounting Firms Wolters Kluwer / CCH 10–12 min

📖AI-Enabled Tax Transformation Deloitte Global 20–25 min

🎥Taking Corporate Tax Management Beyond Provision with Longview insightsoftware / International Tax Review 60 min

Week total: 6 articles + 1 webinar · ~130–147 min (~2.25 hrs)

September total: 20 articles + 6 webinars = 26 resources · ~532–615 min (~8.5–10 hrs)

*any cool content I’ve missed? please let me know.

A selection of open roles across tax tech vendors and tax advisory/consulting businesses who are involved in tax technology.

In house roles are provided courtesy of the smart people at https://taxjobs.ai

Use the column headers to sort, or the search function and don’t forget to navigate all pages!

*I do this using an AI agent and due to the volume, I don’t check every link, so please let me know if any of these don’t work or have disappeared when you follow them.

Want to go deeper? Let’s chat

For Buyers - bespoke vendor analysis, comparisons, tailored market research and vendor selection

For Vendors - Go To Market analysis, strategy and execution support, interim leadership

Click on the image below

The Nexus Issue 22: Taxera

Nexus Tax Technology — Fri, 04 Sep 2026 12:03:11 GMT

The Nexus is Back!

Well the newsletter never really went away, whereas I did, braving the airport EES queus and summer hoards in order to escape the relentless heat in the UK!

Now that I’m back, I’m heads down for the next few weeks working on some great new content for the newsletter, think interviews, event reports, wrapping up the VAT challenger series and starting analysis on the next market segment (TBD).

For now, it’s your final chance to register for the 10th annual strategic indirect tax and vat management summit (Use NEXUSTAXTECHNOLOGY10 for a 10% discount) I’d love to see you there next week.

In this week’s issue we have a refreshed learning plan, new October events, some great jobs as ever and we’re continuing the SAP theme with a look at Taxera, another specialist betting the farm on capturing part of the S4/Hana wave. Enjoy.

Taxera: The SAP-Native Specialist Betting Everything on One ERP.

SAP shops staring down Poland’s KSeF mandate and Germany’s 2027 e-invoicing rollout don’t want a bolt-on suite — they want something that already lives inside SAP BTP. Taxera is betting its whole existence on being that tool, and the SAP relationship checks out; whether the company behind it does is a separate, live question.

WHAT TAXERA ACTUALLY IS

Taxera is a Swiss platform built natively on SAP BTP in the ABAP environment — SAF-T, VAT/GST returns, Intrastat/EC listings, and e-invoicing/CTC across five “hubs” on one SAP-connected data layer. Its centre of gravity is Europe: real depth in Romania, Poland, Italy, Germany, and France, with no US sales-and-use-tax capability. No non-SAP integration, no self-serve tier, no published pricing — every deal starts with an existing SAP estate. Headcount sits around 24 (Tracxn, April 2026), unfunded, revenue estimated well under $2M ARR. The longlist buyer: a SAP S/4HANA manufacturer or distributor already exposed to SAF-T or CTC mandates who wants a specialist inside their ERP.

WHERE IT BEATS THE MARKET BASELINE

Taxera clears the baseline in one place, but convincingly: SAP-native integration, backed by a live SAP partner-directory listing and a dedicated S/4HANA track — evidence most vendors gesture at and Taxera can actually show. SAF-T is the other real strength: a dedicated product, a named regional partner (Balkan Services), and a live Romania mandate, beyond a generic checkbox claim. The Amadeus distribution deal (2024) is an unusually strong third-party proof point for a 24-person company. Below baseline: the map claims 135+ countries tracked, but only five carry a published brief; the ISO 27001/GDPR claim traces to a vendor-submitted aggregator listing with no checkable certificate; and there’s zero integration outside SAP.

PORTFOLIO ANALYSIS

No acquisition story — Taxera has grown by adding hubs organically, tracking with an unfunded balance sheet. Less clean: the entity has been renamed three times since 2018 (BlueVale Consulting → Avanda → Kanuni Technologies → Taxera), with a governance change as recently as February 2026. Reporting (SAF-T, VAT/GST, Intrastat) is estimated to drive ~40% of revenue, E-Invoicing/CTC another ~30% — effectively the whole business, with Calculation, Managed Services, and AI near-zero. The read for operators: a two-product company wrapped in a five-hub UI, and the governance instability is a diligence question, not a footnote.

SEGMENT, DELIVERY MODEL, AND SIZE BAND FITS

Segment archetype fit

● B2B goods: 2 – Good fit — SAP-native SAF-T/VAT/Intrastat reporting maps onto manufacturing and distribution flows.

● B2C goods: 0 – Poor fit — no e-commerce or marketplace connector; SAP-only excludes most retail stacks.

● B2B/B2C digital services: 1 – Patchy fit — e-invoicing/CTC tracking is relevant, but no OSS/IOSS-specific depth.

● B2B/B2C services (non-digital): 0 – Poor fit — no service-industry content or workflow evidenced.

Delivery model fit

● Software-only: 2 – Good fit — genuinely software, not a BPO — though 24 people raises support-capacity questions.

● Software + managed services: 1 – Patchy fit — “Compliance as a Service” language exists, but no evidence of direct delivery.

● Managed services-led: 0 – Poor fit — not the delivery DNA — no BPO-style model found.

● Marketplace / self-serve: 0 – Poor fit — no signup, no pricing, no free trial.

● White-label / OEM: 1 – Patchy fit — the Amadeus deal reads as embedded distribution, but it’s one relationship.

Size band fit

● Small: 0 – Poor fit — no pricing, no self-serve, dependent on a SAP estate small buyers rarely run.

● Medium: 1 – Patchy fit — real SAP depth, offset by a young roadmap and a small delivery team.

● Large: 2 – Good fit — the right shape for multi-entity SAP landscapes — execution capacity is genuinely open.

CUSTOMER AND EMPLOYEE SENTIMENTS

Essentially no customer sentiment to report — no G2, Capterra, Trustpilot, TrustRadius, or Gartner Peer Insights profile beyond a seller-submitted G2 listing with zero reviews. Consistent with a small, direct-sales vendor, not necessarily a red flag alone. Employee sentiment is thinner in volume, sharper in substance.

● G2 / Gartner / Capterra / TrustRadius / Trustpilot: no material profile anywhere.

● Glassdoor (2 reviews): predominantly negative — unstructured management, disputed bonus payments, a customer count reviewers say sits below public claims. Single-source, unverified.

● RepVue / Indeed: no data, unsurprising at this headcount.

● LinkedIn: ~1,221 followers; actively hiring SAP engineers despite the negative Glassdoor signal.

With an n of 2, this isn’t a reliable culture read — but the customer-count allegation is exactly what a reference call should settle first.

IF YOU’RE EVALUATING TAXERA — HERE’S THE READ

For buyers

If you’re Large, B2B goods, running SAP across multiple EU entities with SAF-T or CTC exposure in Romania, Poland, or similar markets, Taxera belongs on a shortlist — but budget time for reference calls, not just a demo. If Medium and SAP-based, the integration depth is real; treat this as an early-adopter bet and verify support capacity first. If you’re not on SAP, skip this one — no Oracle, Dynamics, or e-commerce connector exists, evidenced or roadmapped. If Small, this isn’t built for you. Whatever your size: don’t sign before Taxera gives you a verifiable ISO 27001 certificate number and two live references — the gap between claimed and checkable is the biggest open question here.

For prospective employees

● Good move if you’re an SAP ABAP/BTP engineer wanting focused platform work — the company is actively hiring for exactly these roles.

● Worth a look if you’re a tax content specialist drawn to SAF-T/CTC depth in specific European markets, even if coverage is narrow.

● Ask hard questions in any commercial role: the only public employee testimony alleges disputed bonuses and a low customer count — get specifics before signing.

● Higher-risk if stability matters: three entity renames, no external funding, and a February 2026 governance change form a pattern worth asking about.

Visit The Nexus eCommerce Site

A selection of of opportunities to connect in person and interact online over the next few weeks.

10th Annual Strategic Indirect Tax, VAT Management and E-Invoicing Summit (Conference)

TBM Group | 9–10 September 2026 | Steigenberger Airport Hotel, Amsterdam, Netherlands

Two days bringing together Europe’s most senior indirect tax and VAT professionals to discuss building a compliant, scalable, and future-ready tax function, with sessions on tax technology strategy, VAT management, and e-invoicing readiness. Sovos among confirmed speakers.>

Event Page →

Enter code NEXUSTAXTECHNOLOGY10 for a 10% discount

SEPTEMBER 2026

Audits & Appeals Seminar 2026 (Seminar)

TEI — Tax Executives Institute | 8–10 September 2026 | TBC

A deep-dive seminar equipping in-house tax professionals with the tools and strategies to navigate IRS audits and appeals in an environment where tax administration has shifted significantly — covering preparation, documentation, and the appeals process.

10th Annual Strategic Indirect Tax, VAT Management and E-Invoicing Summit (Conference)

TBM Group | 9–10 September 2026 | Steigenberger Airport Hotel, Amsterdam, Netherlands

Event Page →

Shared Services & Outsourcing Week 2026 — Autumn (Conference)

SSON — Shared Services & Outsourcing Network | 14–17 September 2026 | San Diego, CA

SSON’s autumn flagship conference covering finance, tax, HR, and IT shared services transformation, with a focus on AI adoption, automation, and the future of the GBS operating model.

Tax Should Be at the Table from Day One: An S/4HANA & Indirect Tax Leadership Event (Roundtable)

EY / Meridian / Jaguar Land Rover / SAP | 16 September 2026, 2:30–5:45pm | London Bridge Office, London, UK

Avalara CRUSH 2026 (Conference)

Avalara | 22–24 September 2026 | Fort Lauderdale, FL

E-Invoicing Exchange Summit 2026 (Conference)

E-Invoicing Exchange | 30 September – 2 October 2026 | Hotel MOA Berlin, Berlin, Germany

Event Page →

OCTOBER 2026

Join PwC and Meridian to Discuss Navigating the Future of Tax Compliance (Roundtable)

PwC / Meridian Global Services | 8 October 2026, 13:30–17:30 | PwC Amsterdam Offices, Thomas R. Malthusstraat 5, Amsterdam, Netherlands

An in-person roundtable bringing together finance, tax, and IT leaders to discuss the future of tax compliance, indirect tax automation, and readiness for evolving mandates.

Event Page →

Power of 3: PwC, SAP & Vertex (Roundtable)

PwC / SAP / Vertex | 15 October 2026 | TBC

TEI Annual Conference 2026 (Conference)

TEI — Tax Executives Institute | 21 October 2026 | Grand Hyatt Nashville, Nashville, TN

5th Annual VAT Compliance and Indirect Tax Forum 2026 — ITX (Conference)

Amistat Group | 21–22 October 2026 | Van der Valk Hotel, Brussels, Belgium

Event Page →

IVA Autumn Conference 2026 (Conference)

International VAT Association (IVA) | 22–23 October 2026 | Marseille, France

Event Page →

ITR AI in Tax Forum 2026 — USA (Conference)

International Tax Review | 26 October 2026 | New York, USA

Event Page →

E-Rechnungs-Gipfel 2026 — Repeat Edition (Conference)

Vereon AG / E-Invoicing Exchange Summit | 26–27 October 2026 | Frankfurt am Main, Germany

Event Page →

*any organisers or events I’ve missed? please let me know.

A curated selection of blogs, white-papers and on demand content published by multiple organisartions across the landscape, organised into a themed learning path.

SEPTEMBER 2026

E-Invoicing, Direct Tax, Pillar Two & Synthesis

Week 1 · 7–11 September

The Live Mandate Wave: France, Slovakia, CTC Foundations & the Global Picture

📖Continuous Transaction Controls: The Future of Compliance Sovos12–15 min

📖Global VAT Guide: July 2026 VATupdate / Fintua 10–15 min

📖Sovos TaxScapes Q1 2026: France CTC Pilot, KSeF & Norway Acceleration Sovos 12–15 min

📖5 Things We Can Learn from Belgium’s 2026 E-Invoicing Mandate Innovate Tax 8–10 min

🎥E-Invoicing Trends and Obligations: 2026 and Beyond (feat. Forrester) Comarch / Forrester 60 min

🎥Countdown to Slovakia 2027: Preparing for Mandatory E-Invoicing and Digital Reporting Sovos 45–60 min

Week total: 4 articles + 2 webinars · ~147–175 min (~2.5 hrs)

Week 2 · 14–18 September

ViDA, Platform Architecture & Emerging Markets

📖What is ViDA? VAT in the Digital Age Initiative Q&APagero (Thomson Reuters) 12–15 min

📖Streamline the Future #6: Reporting Built for Global E-Invoicing Operations Comarch 8–10 min

📖Brazil 2026 Tax Reform: Key E-Invoicing Changes Fonoa 10–12 min

📖Leading the Charge: E-Invoicing as the Cornerstone of Future Compliance Vertex Inc. 10–12 min

📖E-Invoicing Transformation: How to Get It Right Pagero (Thomson Reuters) 10–12 min

📖E-Invoicing in Norway and Latest European VAT Updates Marosa VAT 8–10 min

🎥E-Invoicing in Eastern Europe: KSeF, ViDA, Romania, Hungary & BeyondP agero (Thomson Reuters) 45 min

Week total: 2 articles + 1 webinar · ~103–116 min (~1.75 hrs)

Week 3 · 21–25 September

Pillar Two, GIR Filing & the Side-by-Side Package

📖Orbitax Launches Global Pillar Two Compliance Accelerator Orbitax 10–12 min

📖Global Minimum Tax and the Data Management Dilemma Thomson Reuters / Orbitax 10–12 min

📖OECD Side-by-Side Package: Relief for US Multinationals RSM US 12–15 min

📖The New Pillar Two Framework: Unboxing the Side-by-Side Package Alvarez & Marsal 15–18 min

🎥Pillar Two Compliance: Grant Thornton & Orbitax Strategies Orbitax / Grant Thornton 60 min · CPE

🎥Seamless Tax Data Integration: From Any System to Pillar Two Compliance Orbitax / Deloitte 45–60 min

Week total: 4 articles + 2 webinars · ~152–177 min (~2.5 hrs)

Week 4· 28 September – 2 October (Capstone)

Provision, Maturity, US Tax Landscape & Full Synthesis

📖QDMTT: Stay Ahead of the Global Minimum Tax Curve Orbitax (Thomson Reuters) 12–15 min

📖How to Build a Winning Indirect Tax Maturity Roadmap Fonoa 12–15 min

📖The Future of Indirect Tax: 3 Traits Every Modern Tax Team Needs Fonoa 8–10 min

📖2025 Tax Recap & 2026 Preview: OBBBA Compliance UpdatesWolters Kluwer / CCH 8–10 min

📖2025 Tax Recap and 2026 Preview for Accounting Firms Wolters Kluwer / CCH 10–12 min

📖AI-Enabled Tax Transformation Deloitte Global 20–25 min

🎥Taking Corporate Tax Management Beyond Provision with Longview insightsoftware / International Tax Review 60 min

Week total: 6 articles + 1 webinar · ~130–147 min (~2.25 hrs)

September total: 20 articles + 6 webinars = 26 resources · ~532–615 min (~8.5–10 hrs)

*any cool content I’ve missed? please let me know.

A selection of open roles across tax tech vendors and tax advisory/consulting businesses who are involved in tax technology.

In house roles are provided courtesy of the smart people at https://taxjobs.ai

Use the column headers to sort, or the search function and don’t forget to navigate all pages!

*I do this using an AI agent and due to the volume, I don’t check every link, so please let me know if any of these don’t work or have disappeared when you follow them.

Want to go deeper? Let’s chat

For Buyers - bespoke vendor analysis, comparisons, tailored market research and vendor selection

For Vendors - Go To Market analysis, strategy and execution support, interim leadership

Click on the image below

The Nexus Issue 21: Meridian

Nexus Tax Technology — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 07:01:13 GMT

Where is the AI Efficiency in Tax Tech?

A lot of SaaS (and generally non-labour intensive) companies use Revenue Per Employee (RPE) as a key operational health metric to show how efficiently the business is scaling, most don’t choose to publish it exeternally.

In the run up to it’s IPO and since, Klarna has used its revenue-per-employee metric as proof that AI can do what a headcount reduction alone cannot — it can compound efficiency while the top line accelerates. And it’s most recent earnings have shown a clear trend and set a worthy benchmark.

The timeline of the metric itself tells a story they clearly wanted to tell at IPO:

2022: ~$350K per employee
Q2 2025 (first quarter as public): ~$1M — “nearly triple two years ago”
Q1 2026: ~$1.4M — “four times 2022”

So… what does Klarna have to do with tax-tech, well not a lot, but it got me thinking about all the AI Noise in the market right now, particularly when used as justification for redundancies and whether it’s starting to show up yet.

So Klarna’s benchmark may not be appropriate to tax & accounting software, the median for public SaaS companies is around $395k according to Benchmarkit but how about if we compare the vendors to one-another using the simple underlying math. The results are pretty surprising:

Firstly, Intuit is actually on par - The 17% workforce cut announced in May 2026 takes Intuit from roughly $1.17M per employee to $1.40M. Same destination. Different route. Where Klarna made its cuts early and is now harvesting the margin, Intuit is taking the pain in public, mid-cycle, with $300M in restructuring charges and a 13% after-hours share decline as its receipt. The thesis is identical. The timing is messier.

Similar story - smaller scale - with Vertex, who earlier this year announced around 170 roles to be cut, now starts to pull out as the front-runner in the remainder of the pack, with around $370k per employee. Will this contiinue to edge up or will the slower growth they’ve seen recently keep this flat? time will tell.

The more interesting questions are what happens to the accounting firm and broader portfolio operators — Thomson Reuters, Wolters Kluwer, Sage, Xero — sitting in the $270K–$340K band.

These businesses are not inefficient. They are structurally different. Large content teams, specialist editorial, scaled customer bases — these are not headcount you automate away without degrading the product. The ratio reflects the model, not the management.

Sage is pulling away from that cluster. Revenue per employee above $340K and growing, cloud-native re-acceleration at 25%, ARR expanding. Sage is not running the Klarna/Intuit playbook — yet - it is growing revenue faster than it adds people. That is the harder version of the same trick, and arguably the more durable one.

The emerging split in this sector is not between AI adopters and laggards. It is between companies that improve their efficiency ratio by shrinking the denominator and companies that do it by expanding the numerator.

Both paths lead to the same metric. They do not lead to the same business.

Now onto look at Meridian, the SAP VAT specialist that got out of the reclaim game and built a portfolio hooked to a decade long, single vendor, tech refresh event as SAP moves it’s install base over to S4/Hana.

And finally, don’t forget to grab your ticket for the 10th Annual Strategic Indirect Tax, VAT Management and E-Invoicing Summit (Conference), where you can get lots of awesome content and networking, meet me, and get a discount by using the code nexustaxtechnology10, Event Page →

Meridian Global Services: The SAP-Only Bet That Actually Paid Off

Every SAP shop in the world is staring down the same 2027 deadline: migrate to S/4HANA or lose support. Meridian built its entire business on being the tax vendor waiting on the other side of that migration — and it just became the only European vendor certified to prove it.

WHAT MERIDIAN ACTUALLY IS

Meridian is a Dublin-based VAT/GST determination and compliance specialist built entirely inside SAP — ARCO Determination and the legacy VAT Add-on handle real-time tax calculation, ARCO Compliance runs continuous filing and workflow, and a VAT Consulting and Compliance practice handles registrations and returns end to end. Its centre of gravity is European VAT/GST inside SAP ECC6, S/4HANA and BTP specifically: no US sales tax, no Oracle or Dynamics support, and no e-invoicing issuance product behind an otherwise sharp regulatory blog. Estimated headcount sits around 150 (public estimates range 124–152), with revenue directionally in the $25–35M range by analyst build-up estimate — no external investor or PE backer, after Meridian sold its original VAT-reclaim business to VAT IT Group in 2017 specifically to fund this focus. Named references run BASF, Jaguar Land Rover, Goodyear, Samsonite, Mondi and Croda — large, SAP-resident industrial and consumer-goods multinationals, every one of them.

If your indirect tax problem lives entirely inside SAP, this goes on your shortlist. If it doesn’t, skip straight past it — there’s nothing here for you.

WHERE IT BEATS THE MARKET BASELINE

Against the indirect tax baseline, Meridian is clearly above the line on SAP integration depth: ARCO is the first and only European tax-determination solution certified “Built on SAP Business Technology Platform,” and the 90+ live VAT Add-on installations are a real, checkable number, not a marketing line. Managed VAT filing is the other genuine strength — HMRC-recognised MTD software, direct SII (Spain) and JPK (Poland) filing, and a compliance team tracking 3,000+ registrations and 40,000+ declarations a year puts it comfortably ahead of point-solution peers on execution depth.

Where it sits well below baseline: e-invoicing and CTC. The regulatory-tracking content is genuinely excellent — dense, country-by-country coverage of Germany, Poland, France and more — but there’s no shipped issuance product and no Peppol access-point status behind any of it. AI is the same story in miniature: fluent commentary on SAP’s own Joule and BAIP roadmap, zero proprietary tooling of its own.

PORTFOLIO ANALYSIS

Meridian’s portfolio shape comes from a genuinely rare move: divesting rather than acquiring. The company built its original scale on VAT reclaim from 1990, passed through US-listed Profit Recovery Group’s ownership in 1999, then in 2017 sold that reclaim business to VAT IT Group specifically to fund the SAP tax-technology bet. Directionally, Calculation and Compliance/Reporting each account for roughly 30–35% of revenue, with the newer ARCO Compliance layer pulling weight from pure software licensing toward workflow-driven services; Vantage support adds another 10%, and VAT Consulting advisory work fills out the rest. No acquisitions since 2017 — growth has been entirely organic, centred on the 2022 BTP certification and the 2025 ARCO Compliance expansion.

The practical read for operators: this is a narrow, single-codebase platform, not a stitched-together roll-up — which is exactly why it’s so deep in its lane and so absent everywhere outside it.

SEGMENT, DELIVERY MODEL, AND SIZE BAND FITS

Segment archetype fit

● B2B goods: 3 – Strong fit — the sweet spot; SAP-resident manufacturing/industrial/consumer-goods multinationals with complex cross-border VAT flows.

● B2C goods: 1 – Patchy fit — determination logic applies if the seller runs SAP, but no marketplace connectors, OSS/IOSS automation or DAC7.

● B2B/B2C digital services: 1 – Patchy fit — usable in principle, but most digital-services sellers run non-SAP billing stacks Meridian doesn’t touch.

● B2B/B2C services (non-digital): 1 – Patchy fit — the VAT Consulting arm can help, but the core product is built around goods-flow determination.

Delivery model fit

● Software-only: 1 – Patchy fit — workable once implemented, but not the default sales motion.

● Software + managed services: 3 – Strong fit — the actual model; technology and compliance are sold and delivered together.

● Managed services-led: 2 – Good fit — a 30+-year registration/filing track record, though tech-augmented rather than pure BPO.

● Marketplace / self-serve: 0 – Poor fit — no self-serve, no free tier; every path is enterprise sales-assisted.

● White-label / OEM: 1 – Patchy fit — EY, PwC, BDO and Ryan resell and implement, but there’s no formal OEM programme.

Size band fit

● Small: 0 – Poor fit — the entire model assumes an existing SAP investment most small buyers simply don’t have.

● Medium: 1 – Patchy fit — workable for SAP-resident mid-market manufacturers, but nothing targets this segment specifically.

● Large: 3 – Strong fit — built for, and proven with, exactly this buyer: BASF, Jaguar Land Rover, Goodyear, Samsonite.

CUSTOMER AND EMPLOYEE SENTIMENTS

Third-party sentiment for Meridian is the thinnest in this series by review volume — a direct function of a sales-assisted, enterprise-only, SAP-dependent business that simply doesn’t generate self-serve review traffic. What little exists lines up cleanly with the rest of this profile.

● G2 (5.0/5, 1 review): praises SAP S/4HANA compliance, ease of configuration, and a “competent and reliable support team” — take the perfect score with the grain of salt a single review deserves.

● Gartner Peer Insights (5.0/5, 1 review): praises ease of integration and real-time reporting, but flags “initial complexity of the setup” requiring real technical expertise — the one dissenting note worth weighing.

● Trustpilot / Capterra / TrustRadius: no profile found on any of the three — expected, not alarming, given the go-to-market.

● Glassdoor (2.8/5, 127 reviews): a real sample size, sitting roughly 25% below the Management & Consulting industry average; work-life balance (3.4) is the bright spot, compensation (2.0) and career opportunities (2.2) the weak points.

● RepVue: no profile — no scaled outbound sales floor of the kind RepVue tracks.

The product signal is thin but consistent; the people signal is thicker and more concerning. A below-average Glassdoor score on comp and career progression is worth a direct question about account-team continuity before you sign a multi-year filing relationship.

IF YOU’RE BUILDING OR BUYING INDIRECT TAX CAPABILITY — HERE’S THE READ

For buyers

If you’re a large B2B goods multinational running SAP across multiple EU/UK entities, Meridian belongs on your shortlist — the BTP certification and the blue-chip reference list (BASF, JLR, Goodyear) are real, checkable proof, not marketing gloss. If you’re on Oracle, Dynamics, or any non-SAP ERP, skip it entirely: there is zero capability outside SAP by design, and nothing in the public record suggests that’s changing. If e-invoicing/CTC issuance is a near-term requirement rather than a monitoring exercise, don’t treat Meridian’s genuinely excellent regulatory blog as a proxy for a shipped product — get a written roadmap commitment, or bring a second vendor. If you’re medium-sized and SAP-resident, Meridian can work, but you’re an edge case in its go-to-market rather than the target buyer, so expect to do more of the scoping work yourself. And if US sales tax is any part of your footprint, Meridian simply isn’t in that conversation — plan for a second vendor from day one.

For prospective employees

● Good move for SAP tax-technology specialists: the Product Management bench (Tax Technology and ARCO leadership specifically) is stable, long-tenured, and visibly credible in the SAP ecosystem — real domain depth to learn from.

● Worth it for VAT compliance/consulting professionals: a genuine 30+-year track record and Big 4/mid-tier partner relationships (EY, PwC, BDO, Ryan) mean real client exposure, not just internal process work.

● Go in with clear eyes on pay and progression: Glassdoor’s 2.0/5 compensation score and 2.2/5 career-opportunities score, across a meaningful 127-review sample, are the two weakest data points in the whole profile — negotiate hard and ask directly about promotion paths.

● Lower-risk than most challengers on org stability: no PE ownership, no funding-runway clock, and no acquisition-integration churn — a slow-moving, founder-led company, for better (stability) and worse (limited hypergrowth upside).

Visit The Nexus eCommerce Site

A selection of of opportunities to connect in person and interact online over the next few weeks.

SEPTEMBER 2026

E-Invoicing Compliance & Tax Technology Summit (Conference)

Tax Technology Summit | 2 September 2026 | Dubai, UAE

A summit convening global tax and finance leaders in Dubai to examine the next chapter of digital tax administration in the Middle East and GCC region, covering e-invoicing implementation, AI-driven compliance, and what Phase 1 live reporting means in practice.

Event Page →

Audits & Appeals Seminar 2026 (Seminar)

TEI — Tax Executives Institute | 8–10 September 2026 | TBC

10th Annual Strategic Indirect Tax, VAT Management and E-Invoicing Summit (Conference)

TBM Group | 9–10 September 2026 | Steigenberger Airport Hotel, Amsterdam, Netherlands

Event Page →

Enter code NEXUSTAXTECHNOLOGY10 for a 10% discount

Shared Services & Outsourcing Week 2026 — Autumn (Conference)

SSON — Shared Services & Outsourcing Network | 14–17 September 2026 | San Diego, CA

SSON’s autumn flagship conference covering finance, tax, HR, and IT shared services transformation, with a focus on AI adoption, automation, and the future of the GBS operating model.

Avalara CRUSH 2026 (Conference)

Avalara | 22–24 September 2026 | Fort Lauderdale, FL

E-Invoicing Exchange Summit 2026 (Conference)

E-Invoicing Exchange | 30 September – 2 October 2026 | Hotel MOA Berlin, Berlin, Germany

Event Page →

*any organisers or events I’ve missed? please let me know.

A curated selection of blogs, white-papers and on demand content published by multiple organisartions across the landscape, organised into a themed learning path.

AUGUST 2026

Market Intelligence, AI, Agentic Governance & Audit Readiness

August blends the strategic landscape — where the market stands, how AI is actually being deployed, and the emerging governance question that dominated Compliance Connect London — with a strong practical thread on audit readiness. Each week contains a mix of strategy, AI, indirect tax, and operational content so no single theme monopolises a week.

Week 1 · 4–8 August

Setting the Scene: Market Data, Regulatory Context & the AI Inflection Point

01📖 6 Insights from the 2026 Corporate Tax Technology Report Thomson Reuters / TEI 10–12 min

02📖 2026 Indirect Tax TrendsVertex Inc. 8–10 min

03📖 The Future of Tax: Connected Modeling and an AI-Enabled Tax Function KPMG 8–10 min

04📖 Sovos TaxScapes Q1 2026: Regulatory Changes in the Last 90 Days Sovos 10–12 min

05🎥Compliance Connect London 2026 — On-Demand Sessions Thomson Reuters / Pagero 90–120 min

06🎥 Sovos TaxScapes July 2026: What’s Changing in Indirect Tax — US and Global Sovos 45–60 min

Week total: 4 articles + 2 webinars · ~171–224 min (~2.5–3.5 hrs)

Week 2 · 11–15 August

AI Strategy, Agentic Governance & the Vendor Landscape

07📖 The Majority of CFOs Require Human Oversight of Agentic AI: 4 Governance Frameworks Anrok 12–15 min

08📖 AI Tools for Tax Professionals: Automate Smarter, Not Harder Sphere 10–12 min

09📖 AI for Indirect Tax: How Human-AI Collaboration Improves Compliance Fonoa 10–12 min

10📖 Best Sales Tax Software for SaaS Companies: 2026 Guide Kintsugi 12–15 min

11📖 5 Key Indirect Tax Trends from SYNAPSE 2026 Fonoa 10–12 min

12🎥 Beyond the Return: How AI and Automation Are Reshaping Tax Preparation Wolters Kluwer / CCH 50–60 min

Week total: 5 articles + 1 webinar · ~104–126 min (~1.75–2 hrs)

Week 3 · 18–22 August

Audit Readiness, Organisational Maturity & the Strategic Tax Function

13📖 Ready Before the Notice: A Sales Tax & VAT Audit Playbook Anrok / KPMG 20–25 min

14📖 Multi-State Tax Complexity: What Tax Teams Need to Know Wolters Kluwer / CCH 8–10 min

15📖 Beyond Compliance: How Tax Professionals Are Becoming Strategic Advisors Wolters Kluwer / CCH 8–10 min

16📖 Survive or Thrive? 2026 Will Test Tax Teams’ Limits Wolters Kluwer / CCH 6–8 min

17📖 Transforming Indirect Tax: 5 Insights from the 7th Annual VAT Management Summit Fonoa 10–12 min

18🎥From VAT Reporting to Real-Time Control: The New Era of VAT Compliance Sovos 45–60 min

Week total: 5 articles + 1 webinar · ~97–125 min (~1.5–2 hrs)

Week 4 · 25–29 August

Platform Strategy, the Vendor Market & the Indirect Tax Architecture Decision

19📖 Vertex Announces Strategic Investment in Kintsugi: Market Signal Vertex / Kintsugi 6–8 min

20📖 Tax Tech Strategy: Integrate Technology for Compliance Fonoa 10–12 min

21📖 Indirect Tax Transformation: Navigating Change, Embracing Technology Thomson Reuters 10–12 min

22📖 8 Best Cross-Border VAT Compliance Software: 2026 Guide Kintsugi 12–15 min

23🎥 Embracing the Future of Tax Compliance with AI Avalara 45–60 min

Week total: 4 articles + 1 webinar · ~83–107 min (~1.5 hrs)

August total: 18 articles + 5 webinars = 23 resources · ~455–582 min (~7.5–9.5 hrs)

*any cool content I’ve missed? please let me know.

A selection of open roles across tax tech vendors and tax advisory/consulting businesses who are involved in tax technology.

In house roles are provided courtesy of the smart people at https://taxjobs.ai

Use the column headers to sort, or the search function and don’t forget to navigate all pages!

*I do this using an AI agent and due to the volume, I don’t check every link, so please let me know if any of these don’t work or have disappeared when you follow them.

The Nexus Issue 20: Cygnet One

Nexus Tax Technology — Fri, 21 Aug 2026 07:30:50 GMT

The Nexus Goes on Tour! ✈️

After 5 months of mostly being in my home office (which I’ve loved, don’t get me wrong) I’m happy to be braving the EES queue at Schipol as I’ve been invited to the 10th annual strategic indirect tax and vat management summit/ by the lovely people at TBM Group.

If you’re going to be there, I’d love to meet up, just drop me a line via linkedin or my email… But if you haven’t decided yet, I have a special treat for you, a 10% discount code especially for Nexus readers (worth up to 300 Euros), you’re welcome 😊

Use NEXUSTAXTECHNOLOGY10 for a 10% discount

Now for this week’s issue, where we take a closer look at a lesser-known but nonetheless interesting player in the VAT market, Cygnet One and how their assembled stack fares when taken off of it’s Indian GST home turf.

Cygnet One: India’s GST Engine Auditions for a Global Role

Every CTC vendor claims global reach. Cygnet One is one of the few that can point to a government-issued credential proving it in one market — and is now spending real acquisition money finding out whether that credibility travels.

What Cygnet One actually is

Cygnet One is the indirect-tax arm of a 25-year-old Ahmedabad IT-services group, built on continuous GST Suvidha Provider status held since 2017: GST/VAT determination, e-invoicing, e-Way Bill generation, filing, reconciliation and litigation support, plus a growing UK/EU VAT line and e-invoicing live across 22-plus jurisdictions spanning APAC, Africa, the Middle East and Europe. Its centre of gravity is ERP-and-authority-first — SAP (a certified Gold Partner via a 2026 acquisition), Oracle, Dynamics and Tally, plus GSTN, ZATCA and Peppol credentials most challengers only claim generically. Group headcount runs roughly 830–1,000, revenue in the US$12–60M band for the primary Indian entity — though that spans a much wider IT-services business, not tax alone. A fit for buyers already living inside GST, GCC VAT or e-invoicing mandates who want one group handling both ERP and compliance.

Where it beats the market baseline

Cygnet clears table stakes and then some on e-invoicing/CTC: government credentials (GSP status, ZATCA recognition, India’s first OpenPeppol membership), a double-digit share of India’s e-invoice volume, and a security stack — ISO 27001, CMMI Level 5, SOC 2 Type II — corroborated across many independent pages, not one badge. SAP depth is real, backed by an acquired Gold Partner team. Below baseline: zero US sales-tax capability, thin EU reporting (Intrastat, SAF-T), no e-commerce connector, and near-total absence from independent review platforms — G2, Trustpilot, Capterra and TrustRadius all return nothing.

Portfolio read

The acquisition trail is deliberate, not roll-up-for-revenue: euVAT Online (2021) bought UK/EU VAT, Glib.ai (2022) bought AI/OCR, and two 2026 deals — Connectivity IT and TechPoint, a SAP Gold Partner — bought infrastructure and certified ERP depth. Reporting and E-Invoicing/CTC together plausibly drive most tax-line revenue; Calculation and Integration remain under-monetised standalone. The honest read: one deep, government-verified product, now buying its way into capabilities a global platform needs faster than it’s built the documentation to match.

Business model and size-band fit

B2B goods: 3 – Strong fit. GST/e-invoicing depth plus SAP Gold Partner status maps onto manufacturing flows.
B2C goods: 2 – Good fit. Core compliance is solid; no marketplace connector is a real gap.
B2B/C digital services: 2 – Good fit. Standard coverage, no specialist digital-services depth.
B2B/C services (non-digital): 2 – Good fit. Managed Services and Litigation Management cover the standard case.
Small: 2 – Good fit. A genuine self-serve, published-price tail (Cygnet FACE) most peers lack — India-GST-specific though.
Medium: 3 – Strong fit. Active roadmap, 250+ ERP integrations, real SAP delivery bench.
Large: 2 – Good fit. Global e-invoicing breadth, capped by zero US coverage and thin EU depth.

Customer and employee sentiment

No independent review trail exists — no G2, Trustpilot, Capterra or TrustRadius listing, so you can’t check Cygnet’s case studies against a crowd. What you get instead is specific: a 97% invoice-rejection reduction for an auto-component MNC, 350 hours saved on filing for a bank — curated, but concrete.

Vendor cases: consistently positive on speed and reconciliation accuracy; vendor-curated, read accordingly.
Glassdoor: 3.6/5 across ~493 reviews, just under the ~3.9 IT-industry average; work-life balance edges out culture and pay.
RepVue: no profile — no disclosed Western-style sales org of the size RepVue tracks.
Indeed: individual reviews skew positive; no aggregate score verified.

Operator implication: request direct references rather than expecting G2-style validation; read Glassdoor as a stable, average, services-heavy org — not a standout or a red flag.

If you’re a buyer, do this. If you’re a candidate, read this.

If you’re a Large or Medium B2B goods business running SAP with GST, GCC VAT or e-invoicing exposure in Cygnet’s jurisdictions, shortlist it. If you need one platform for US sales tax and global VAT/GST, look elsewhere. If you’re a small Indian GST filer, Cygnet FACE’s published pricing is a genuinely rare, low-friction entry point. If you’re EU-heavy on Intrastat or SAF-T, confirm depth directly — public documentation doesn’t yet show it.

For prospective employees:

GST/e-invoicing specialists and SAP delivery talent (especially post-TechPoint) sit at the real centre of gravity — genuine thrive potential.
Indirect-tax headcount isn’t broken out from the ~900-person group total, so a dedicated tax-team career track is harder to see from outside.
Two acquisitions closing months apart in 2026 mean integration friction is still unresolved — expect some churn.
No RepVue data exists, so there’s no sales-org attainment signal; ask directly about quota structure for commercial roles.
Bootstrapped and family-owned means no PE-cadence pressure, but also no external capital accelerating the international push.

Visit The Nexus eCommerce Site

A selection of of opportunities to connect in person and interact online over the next few weeks

SEPTEMBER 2026

E-Invoicing Compliance & Tax Technology Summit (Conference)

Tax Technology Summit | 2 September 2026 | Dubai, UAE

Event Page →

Audits & Appeals Seminar 2026 (Seminar)

TEI — Tax Executives Institute | 8–10 September 2026 | TBC

10th Annual Strategic Indirect Tax, VAT Management and E-Invoicing Summit (Conference)

TBM Group | 9–10 September 2026 | Steigenberger Airport Hotel, Amsterdam, Netherlands

Event Page →

Enter code NEXUSTAXTECHNOLOGY10 for a 10% discount

Shared Services & Outsourcing Week 2026 — Autumn (Conference)

SSON — Shared Services & Outsourcing Network | 14–17 September 2026 | San Diego, CA

SSON’s autumn flagship conference covering finance, tax, HR, and IT shared services transformation, with a focus on AI adoption, automation, and the future of the GBS operating model.

Avalara CRUSH 2026 (Conference)

Avalara | 22–24 September 2026 | Fort Lauderdale, FL

E-Invoicing Exchange Summit 2026 (Conference)

E-Invoicing Exchange | 30 September – 2 October 2026 | Hotel MOA Berlin, Berlin, Germany

Event Page →

*any organisers or events I’ve missed? please let me know.

A curated selection of blogs, white-papers and on demand content published by multiple organisartions across the landscape, organised into a themed learning path.

AUGUST 2026

Market Intelligence, AI, Agentic Governance & Audit Readiness

Week 1 · 4–8 August

Setting the Scene: Market Data, Regulatory Context & the AI Inflection Point

01📖 6 Insights from the 2026 Corporate Tax Technology Report Thomson Reuters / TEI 10–12 min

02📖 2026 Indirect Tax TrendsVertex Inc. 8–10 min

03📖 The Future of Tax: Connected Modeling and an AI-Enabled Tax Function KPMG 8–10 min

04📖 Sovos TaxScapes Q1 2026: Regulatory Changes in the Last 90 Days Sovos 10–12 min

05🎥Compliance Connect London 2026 — On-Demand Sessions Thomson Reuters / Pagero 90–120 min

06🎥 Sovos TaxScapes July 2026: What’s Changing in Indirect Tax — US and Global Sovos 45–60 min

Week total: 4 articles + 2 webinars · ~171–224 min (~2.5–3.5 hrs)

Week 2 · 11–15 August

AI Strategy, Agentic Governance & the Vendor Landscape

07📖 The Majority of CFOs Require Human Oversight of Agentic AI: 4 Governance Frameworks Anrok 12–15 min

08📖 AI Tools for Tax Professionals: Automate Smarter, Not Harder Sphere 10–12 min

09📖 AI for Indirect Tax: How Human-AI Collaboration Improves Compliance Fonoa 10–12 min

10📖 Best Sales Tax Software for SaaS Companies: 2026 Guide Kintsugi 12–15 min

11📖 5 Key Indirect Tax Trends from SYNAPSE 2026 Fonoa 10–12 min

12🎥 Beyond the Return: How AI and Automation Are Reshaping Tax Preparation Wolters Kluwer / CCH 50–60 min

Week total: 5 articles + 1 webinar · ~104–126 min (~1.75–2 hrs)

Week 3 · 18–22 August

Audit Readiness, Organisational Maturity & the Strategic Tax Function

13📖 Ready Before the Notice: A Sales Tax & VAT Audit Playbook Anrok / KPMG 20–25 min

14📖 Multi-State Tax Complexity: What Tax Teams Need to Know Wolters Kluwer / CCH 8–10 min

15📖 Beyond Compliance: How Tax Professionals Are Becoming Strategic Advisors Wolters Kluwer / CCH 8–10 min

16📖 Survive or Thrive? 2026 Will Test Tax Teams’ Limits Wolters Kluwer / CCH 6–8 min

17📖 Transforming Indirect Tax: 5 Insights from the 7th Annual VAT Management Summit Fonoa 10–12 min

18🎥From VAT Reporting to Real-Time Control: The New Era of VAT Compliance Sovos 45–60 min

Week total: 5 articles + 1 webinar · ~97–125 min (~1.5–2 hrs)

Week 4 · 25–29 August

Platform Strategy, the Vendor Market & the Indirect Tax Architecture Decision

19📖 Vertex Announces Strategic Investment in Kintsugi: Market Signal Vertex / Kintsugi 6–8 min

20📖 Tax Tech Strategy: Integrate Technology for Compliance Fonoa 10–12 min

21📖 Indirect Tax Transformation: Navigating Change, Embracing Technology Thomson Reuters 10–12 min

22📖 8 Best Cross-Border VAT Compliance Software: 2026 Guide Kintsugi 12–15 min

23🎥 Embracing the Future of Tax Compliance with AI Avalara 45–60 min

Week total: 4 articles + 1 webinar · ~83–107 min (~1.5 hrs)

August total: 18 articles + 5 webinars = 23 resources · ~455–582 min (~7.5–9.5 hrs)

*any cool content I’ve missed? please let me know.

A selection of open roles across tax tech vendors and tax advisory/consulting businesses who are involved in tax technology.

In house roles are provided courtesy of the smart people at https://taxjobs.ai

Use the column headers to sort, or the search function and don’t forget to navigate all pages!

*I do this using an AI agent and due to the volume, I don’t check every link, so please let me know if any of these don’t work or have disappeared when you follow them.

Based on great feedback & demand since the success of the Kintsugi sponsored issue, The Nexus is now open for corporate sponsorship, click above or contact me if you’re interested.

The Nexus Issue 19: Pincvision

Nexus Tax Technology — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 07:30:34 GMT

A quick interruption from me, based on great feedback & demand since the success of the Kintsugi sponsored issue, The Nexus is now open for corporate sponsorship, click above and contact me if you’re interested.

This week’s issue take a closer look at Pincvision and their enterprise grade tax and customs compliance outsourcing business.

Pincvision: The Blue-Chip Compliance Partner That Skipped the SaaS Playbook

While most vendors in this series chase G2 stars and self-serve signups, Pincvision has spent two decades quietly running VAT, Intrastat, EPR and customs compliance for Nestlé, Cisco, IBM and GE — without a single public review to show for it. As EPR obligations spread across more product categories and ViDA tightens the screws on e-invoicing, that old-school, all-in-one outsourcing model deserves a second look.

WHAT PINCVISION ACTUALLY IS

Pincvision is a Doetinchem, Netherlands-based trade-compliance outsourcing firm, founded in 2002, that bundles VAT/GST compliance, Intrastat reporting, Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) filing, e-invoicing/CTC, customs declarations and AEO administration under one long-term service relationship — not a single-product tax platform. Its centre of gravity is squarely European and goods-centric: there’s no US sales tax capability and no e-commerce/marketplace integration anywhere in its public material. Headcount runs an estimated 65–100, with directional revenue around €10–15M — though a meaningful chunk of that sits outside indirect tax altogether, in customs and export-document services. The buyer signal is unambiguous: large, physical-goods multinationals — chemicals, electronics, machinery, food & beverage, automotive — who want one accountable partner across a wide compliance surface, not a best-of-breed calculation engine.

WHERE IT BEATS THE MARKET BASELINE

Pincvision’s clearest above-baseline strength is EPR/environmental depth: WEEE, packaging, PPWR, batteries and a genuinely niche Clothing/Linen/Footwear category, plus a fee-administration layer most peers don’t offer. Managed Services is equally strong — registrations, fiscal representation and AEO administration built on 20-plus years of delivery history, evidenced by roughly 350 VAT filings a month across ~30 countries. Breadth is the other differentiator: VAT, Intrastat, EPR, e-invoicing, customs and export documents all sit under one roof, which is rare in this market. Where it sits at or below baseline: e-invoicing/CTC coverage (seven named countries versus the 15–20+ some specialists document), no certified SAP, Oracle or Dynamics connector, no published pricing beyond a narrow export-documents webshop, and — the standout gap — no independently verifiable SOC 2 or ISO 27001 certification, despite handling customs and VAT data for Fortune-500-scale clients.

PORTFOLIO ANALYSIS

There’s no acquisition history here — Pincvision has grown entirely organically and remains founder-owned, with no PE or institutional capital identified anywhere. Directionally, VAT/Intrastat filing and managed services carry the largest share of tax-relevant revenue (a combined ~40%), EPR adds another ~15%, and e-invoicing is still a smaller, growing ~10% slice. The real portfolio story is what sits outside that mix entirely: export documents, customs declarations and AEO administration plausibly account for over a quarter of total revenue. That’s the judgement call worth sitting with — Pincvision isn’t a tax-tech vendor that also does customs; it’s a customs and trade-compliance generalist for whom VAT is one line among several. Buyers evaluating it purely as a VAT platform are using the wrong yardstick.

SEGMENT, DELIVERY MODEL, AND SIZE BAND FITS

Segment archetype fit

B2B goods: 3 – Strong fit — the blue-chip manufacturing client base is exactly what the core VAT/Intrastat/EPR/customs bundle was built for.
B2C goods: 2 – Good fit — EPR depth genuinely serves large consumer-goods multinationals; zero marketplace integration rules out self-serve or e-commerce-native sellers.
B2B/B2C digital services: 1 – Patchy fit — general VAT/e-invoicing capability applies, but the deepest lines (Intrastat, EPR, customs) are structurally irrelevant.
B2B/B2C services (non-digital): 1 – Patchy fit — VAT and fiscal representation apply generically; the real differentiators are goods-trade-specific.

Delivery model fit

Software-only: 1 – Patchy fit — DEVI is explicitly not sold as standalone software.
Software + managed services: 3 – Strong fit — this is the actual operating model.
Managed services-led: 3 – Strong fit — full-service registrations, filings, AEO and customs declarations.
Marketplace/self-serve: 1 – Patchy fit — a narrow export-documents webshop is the only self-serve channel.
White-label/OEM: 0 – Poor fit — no reseller motion evidenced anywhere.

Size band fit

Small: 1 – Patchy fit — no published pricing and a sales-assisted, registration-dependent onboarding path.
Medium: 2 – Good fit — genuinely wide functional breadth, though integration depth and SLA disclosure lag.
Large: 2 – Good fit — built for multinational complexity, but no independently verifiable security certification or named Big 4 delivery partner.

CUSTOMER AND EMPLOYEE SENTIMENTS

This is the most unusual sentiment picture in the series so far: Pincvision has no profile on G2, Trustpilot, Capterra, Gartner Peer Insights or TrustRadius — not low scores, no profile at all. That’s a genuine finding, not a data gap: this is an enterprise, RFP-driven buyer base that validates vendors through references, not star ratings.

Glassdoor: 4.4/5, but just one review — directionally positive, statistically meaningless.
RepVue: no profile — consistent with no large-scale, quota-carrying sales organisation.
LinkedIn: 1,691 followers; team composition skews toward named compliance-specialist roles over engineering.

With almost nothing independent to lean on, the operator implication is simple: treat Pincvision’s own case studies and reference list as a starting point, not a conclusion, and insist on direct reference calls before committing.

IF YOU’RE BUYING TRADE-COMPLIANCE CAPABILITY — HERE’S THE READ

For buyers

If you’re a Medium or Large B2B goods manufacturer running EU/UK operations and want one partner across VAT, Intrastat, EPR, e-invoicing and customs, Pincvision belongs on your shortlist — especially if you’re newly exposed to EPR across multiple categories and want compliance filing and fee administration handled together. If you’re SAP- or Oracle-native and need a certified connector, treat that as an open question, not an assumption: nothing publicly evidences certified-partner status. If your indirect tax problem is US sales tax, or you run an e-commerce/marketplace business, look elsewhere — neither is in scope here. And regardless of segment, get SOC 2/ISO 27001 documentation and a fully itemised, all-lines quote in writing before you sign; both are conspicuously absent from the public record.

For prospective employees

Strong move for trade-compliance and customs specialists: 20-plus years of AEO credentials and genuinely broad regulatory scope make for real depth of practice.
Good fit for EPR/environmental specialists: arguably the company’s most differentiated, fastest-growing line.
Open question for engineers: the technology bench (IT Architect, Cloud Engineer, BI Specialist) is real but small relative to the compliance-specialist headcount — clarify team size and roadmap ownership before joining.
Hard to assess for anyone else: with only one Glassdoor review and no RepVue data, there’s essentially no independent signal on culture, leadership or attrition — research this one through direct conversations, not review sites.

Visit The Nexus eCommerce Site

A selection of of opportunities to connect in person and interact online over the next few weeks

SEPTEMBER 2026

E-Invoicing Compliance & Tax Technology Summit (Conference)

Tax Technology Summit | 2 September 2026 | Dubai, UAE

Event Page →

Audits & Appeals Seminar 2026 (Seminar)

TEI — Tax Executives Institute | 8–10 September 2026 | TBC

10th Annual Strategic Indirect Tax, VAT Management and E-Invoicing Summit (Conference)

TBM Group | 9–10 September 2026 | Steigenberger Airport Hotel, Amsterdam, Netherlands

Event Page →

Shared Services & Outsourcing Week 2026 — Autumn (Conference)

SSON — Shared Services & Outsourcing Network | 14–17 September 2026 | San Diego, CA

SSON’s autumn flagship conference covering finance, tax, HR, and IT shared services transformation, with a focus on AI adoption, automation, and the future of the GBS operating model.

Avalara CRUSH 2026 (Conference)

Avalara | 22–24 September 2026 | Fort Lauderdale, FL

E-Invoicing Exchange Summit 2026 (Conference)

E-Invoicing Exchange | 30 September – 2 October 2026 | Hotel MOA Berlin, Berlin, Germany

Event Page →

*any organisers or events I’ve missed? please let me know.

A curated selection of blogs, white-papers and on demand content published by multiple organisartions across the landscape, organised into a themed learning path.

AUGUST 2026

Market Intelligence, AI, Agentic Governance & Audit Readiness

Week 1 · 4–8 August

Setting the Scene: Market Data, Regulatory Context & the AI Inflection Point

01📖 6 Insights from the 2026 Corporate Tax Technology Report Thomson Reuters / TEI 10–12 min

02📖 2026 Indirect Tax TrendsVertex Inc. 8–10 min

03📖 The Future of Tax: Connected Modeling and an AI-Enabled Tax Function KPMG 8–10 min

04📖 Sovos TaxScapes Q1 2026: Regulatory Changes in the Last 90 Days Sovos 10–12 min

05🎥Compliance Connect London 2026 — On-Demand Sessions Thomson Reuters / Pagero 90–120 min

06🎥 Sovos TaxScapes July 2026: What’s Changing in Indirect Tax — US and Global Sovos 45–60 min

Week total: 4 articles + 2 webinars · ~171–224 min (~2.5–3.5 hrs)

Week 2 · 11–15 August

AI Strategy, Agentic Governance & the Vendor Landscape

07📖 The Majority of CFOs Require Human Oversight of Agentic AI: 4 Governance Frameworks Anrok 12–15 min

08📖 AI Tools for Tax Professionals: Automate Smarter, Not Harder Sphere 10–12 min

09📖 AI for Indirect Tax: How Human-AI Collaboration Improves Compliance Fonoa 10–12 min

10📖 Best Sales Tax Software for SaaS Companies: 2026 Guide Kintsugi 12–15 min

11📖 5 Key Indirect Tax Trends from SYNAPSE 2026 Fonoa 10–12 min

12🎥 Beyond the Return: How AI and Automation Are Reshaping Tax Preparation Wolters Kluwer / CCH 50–60 min

Week total: 5 articles + 1 webinar · ~104–126 min (~1.75–2 hrs)

Week 3 · 18–22 August

Audit Readiness, Organisational Maturity & the Strategic Tax Function

13📖 Ready Before the Notice: A Sales Tax & VAT Audit Playbook Anrok / KPMG 20–25 min

14📖 Multi-State Tax Complexity: What Tax Teams Need to Know Wolters Kluwer / CCH 8–10 min

15📖 Beyond Compliance: How Tax Professionals Are Becoming Strategic Advisors Wolters Kluwer / CCH 8–10 min

16📖 Survive or Thrive? 2026 Will Test Tax Teams’ Limits Wolters Kluwer / CCH 6–8 min

17📖 Transforming Indirect Tax: 5 Insights from the 7th Annual VAT Management Summit Fonoa 10–12 min

18🎥From VAT Reporting to Real-Time Control: The New Era of VAT Compliance Sovos 45–60 min

Week total: 5 articles + 1 webinar · ~97–125 min (~1.5–2 hrs)

Week 4 · 25–29 August

Platform Strategy, the Vendor Market & the Indirect Tax Architecture Decision

19📖 Vertex Announces Strategic Investment in Kintsugi: Market Signal Vertex / Kintsugi 6–8 min

20📖 Tax Tech Strategy: Integrate Technology for Compliance Fonoa 10–12 min

21📖 Indirect Tax Transformation: Navigating Change, Embracing Technology Thomson Reuters 10–12 min

22📖 8 Best Cross-Border VAT Compliance Software: 2026 Guide Kintsugi 12–15 min

23🎥 Embracing the Future of Tax Compliance with AI Avalara 45–60 min

Week total: 4 articles + 1 webinar · ~83–107 min (~1.5 hrs)

August total: 18 articles + 5 webinars = 23 resources · ~455–582 min (~7.5–9.5 hrs)

*any cool content I’ve missed? please let me know.

A selection of open roles across tax tech vendors and tax advisory/consulting businesses who are involved in tax technology.

In house roles are provided courtesy of the smart people at https://taxjobs.ai

Use the column headers to sort, or the search function and don’t forget to navigate all pages!

*I do this using an AI agent and due to the volume, I don’t check every link, so please let me know if any of these don’t work or have disappeared when you follow them.

The Nexus Issue 18: Marosa VAT

Nexus Tax Technology — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 07:01:10 GMT

🎶Working 9 to 5🎵

Grant Thornton just paid $5 billion to move from 9th to 5th place in the accounting firm rankings. Here’s what its CBIZ deal tells us about who really controls tax technology buying decisions from here.

WHAT JUST HAPPENED

On 29 July 2026, Grant Thornton announced an all-cash, $5 billion acquisition of CBIZ (NYSE: CBZ), backed by additional equity from New Mountain Capital. It’s the largest deal the accounting profession has seen in more than 25 years, expected to close Q4 2026 pending shareholder and regulatory approval.

The combined firm becomes the fifth-largest professional services, tax and advisory provider in the US — behind only Deloitte, EY, KPMG and PwC — with north of $5 billion in domestic revenue, $7.5 billion globally, and 34,500+ people. Grant Thornton walked in at #9 on Accounting Today’s 2026 Top 100 ($2.5bn revenue); CBIZ was #8 ($2.8bn). One transaction, one rung skipped past RSM and BDO.

WHAT CBIZ ACTUALLY IS

CBIZ isn’t a tax boutique — it’s a diversified middle-market platform, and that matters for how this plays out:

→ Scale: 10,000+ team members across 160+ locations in 22 major US markets. Founded 1987, Independence, Ohio. Until this deal, the only publicly traded pure accounting services provider in the country.
→ Financial Services ($1.36bn, FY24): core accounting, tax compliance, transaction and risk advisory, valuation, government healthcare compliance — the practice group that actually overlaps with GT’s tax business.
→ Benefits and Insurance Services ($401m, FY24): group health, P&C brokerage, retirement advisory. This unit is being spun off post-close as an independent company, separately backed by New Mountain.
→ National Practices ($49.9m, FY24): IT/hardware and healthcare consulting, plus a cyber risk program — the technology-delivery muscle GT is buying alongside the client book.
→ Track record: grown through 25+ acquisitions in a decade, including the $2.3bn Marcum LLP buy in November 2024 that made CBIZ #7 in the first place. This firm was already a serial acquirer before GT acquired it.

THE PE X ACCOUNTING PLAYBOOK, CONFIRMED

This isn’t a one-off — it’s the second act of a strategy that started when New Mountain Capital took roughly 60% of Grant Thornton’s US arm in May 2024. The FT called that investment a war chest for acquisitions at the time. CBIZ is that war chest being spent.

Now we’ve seen the playbook run in the software industry a lot,Most notably with SOVOS, Avalara to an extent, it’s also being run by Alphatax as we speak. The mechanic is consistent — buy a platform, bolt on targets for three to five years, expand the EBITDA multiple from mid-single digits to double digits at entry, exit at the top.

Accounting M&A hit a record 194 deals in 2025 — up 26% year-over-year — and it’s still climbing in 2026. Accounting was a fragmented, founder-owned industry for decades. It isn’t anymore.

Accounting M&A hit a record 194 deals in 2025 — up 26% year-over-year — and it’s still climbing in 2026.

WHAT IT DOES TO TAX TECHNOLOGY

No tech vendor changes hands in this deal — They all keep competing exactly as they did on 28 July. What changes is who’s sitting across the table from them. What happens next?

→ The mid-market GTM battle gets sharper. CBIZ’s client base is exactly the segment Avalara, Kintsugi, Anrok and Sphere are fighting to own. A preferred-vendor bundle pushed through that book reshapes GTM math for anyone selling below enterprise.
→ Global reach is being built in parallel. GT has been adding member firms — Australia, New Zealand, Luxembourg, UAE — alongside this deal. That’s a platform positioning for multinational VAT/GST advisory, putting it on a collision course with the Big Four’s grip on ONESOURCE and Sovos channel relationships.

For the Big Four — Deloitte, PwC, EY and KPMG this deal isn’t an existential threat, but it does narrow the gap on an axis mid-market clients actually feel: a client that used to default to a Big Four name purely for scale now has a $5bn+ alternative with matching resources, and all four firms are already absorbing their own cost pressure and job cuts while GT is adding headcount. Expect the response to show up less in pricing and more in partnership terms — sharper implementation-partner incentives, faster certification cycles, and closer co-marketing with taxtech vendors to keep mid-market indirect tax engagements inside the Big Four tent before GT’s bigger platform starts pulling them out.

ADVICE FOR OPERATORS

→ Vendors: get in front of GT’s national tax leadership now. Post-merger tech-stack decisions get locked in during the first 12–18 months of integration — after that, preferred-partner status calcifies.

→ Don’t treat this as a one-off. RSM and BDO now face a decision point. Once one platform pulls this far ahead on scale, the rest have to answer — expect defensive M&A within 12 months.

→ Rebuild your channel map for concentration, not fragmentation. Selling into CPA firms used to mean reaching many independent decision-makers. That’s inverting. Fewer, bigger, harder-to-reach buying committees are the new default — build your GTM motion for that now, not after the next deal closes.

→ If you’re a GT or CBIZ client: get ahead of the integration, don’t wait for it to land on you. Confirm who owns your engagement through close (expected Q4 2026), ask directly whether your tax technology stack recommendation is under review, and watch for changes to your service team or pricing structure in the first two quarters post-close — that’s when preferred-vendor decisions and staffing reshuffles typically happen, and clients who ask early get more say in the outcome than clients who find out after the fact.

Now to move on to the rest of the issue, next up the spotlight turns on Marosa VAT a serious emerging player in the European VAT technology space, so much so that CCH just paid 112M for them

Marosa: The Enterprise VAT Backbone Europe’s Big Four Alumni Built the Hard Way

Most challengers in this market chase self-serve marketplace sellers. Marosa did the opposite — nine years of bootstrapped, services-heavy VAT compliance for European enterprises — before Aquiline Capital Partners handed it €12 million in November 2024 to go find out how far that model scales.

WHAT MAROSA ACTUALLY IS

Marosa is a Vigo, Spain-based VAT and e-invoicing compliance platform, VATify, covering VAT/GST returns, SAF-T, Intrastat, e-invoicing and Continuous Transaction Controls across roughly twenty country modules, VAT registration and fiscal representation, and EPR reporting in Germany, France and Spain. Its centre of gravity is Europe and the UK — no US sales-and-use tax, no meaningful APAC or LatAm depth. Headcount estimates are inconsistent across sources (76 to 250–499), and revenue is undisclosed; a bottom-up build from its 1,200+ customers and 40,000+ annual returns points to roughly €20–30M ARR. This is a vendor for mid-market and enterprise finance teams centralising EU/UK VAT across an ERP or shared-service centre, not a self-serve tool for solo sellers.

WHERE IT BEATS THE MARKET BASELINE

Marosa’s e-invoicing/CTC line is genuinely above baseline: Peppol-certified, accredited under France’s Plateforme Agréée scheme, and documented country-by-country at the technical-format level (FA(3), FatturaPA, XRechnung/ZUGFeRD, SII/VeriFactu). Its AI suite is unusually substantive for this tier — four named, working tools (a natural-language analytics copilot, a knowledge-constrained advisor, an agentic letters-processing tool, a legislation-linked rate engine) rather than one accelerator case study. Reporting and Managed Services are equally strong, backed by real scale evidence. Below baseline: no published pricing anywhere, no verifiable SAP/Oracle NetSuite/Dynamics certification despite generic ERP claims, e-commerce integration limited to Amazon and Stripe, and an ISO 27001 claim that isn’t independently corroborated.

PORTFOLIO ANALYSIS

Growth has been almost entirely organic — EPR, the AI suite, the country-module build-out — plus one inorganic move: absorbing Taxdoo’s VAT-only customer book as that German rival pivots to accounting, a real DACH expansion dressed up as a “partnership.” Reporting is the largest estimated revenue contributor (~40%), with E-Invoicing/CTC (~25%) the fastest-growing line and the clearest destination for Aquiline’s capital. Read: a services-heavy revenue base, expanding into exactly the CTC mandates now accelerating across Europe.

BUSINESS MODEL AND SIZE BAND FITS

B2B goods: 3 – Strong fit at Medium/Large — ERP-connected filing and Reporting depth are built for this buyer.
B2C goods: 2 – Good fit — EPR and OSS-adjacent filing help, but integration breadth trails marketplace specialists.
B2B/B2C digital services: 2 – Good fit — solid general VAT/GST coverage, no specialist digital-services edge.
B2B/B2C services: 2 – Good fit — registration and fiscal-rep services carry this segment.
Small: 1 – Patchy fit — no published pricing or self-serve signup, a real mismatch for low-touch buyers.
Medium: 2–3 – Good to Strong fit — the clearest sweet spot, backed by active roadmap investment.
Large: 2 – Good fit — strong on European complexity, capped by unverified security posture and thin SI partnerships.

CUSTOMER AND EMPLOYEE SENTIMENTS

G2 (4.4/5, ~28 reviews): reliability, professionalism, and a “well thought out” tech stack are the recurring themes.
Trustpilot (4.5/5, 32 reviews): strongly positive overall, with a sharp negative minority flagging delivery timeliness on new VAT setups.
Capterra, Gartner Peer Insights, TrustRadius: no presence found — a narrower footprint than category leaders.
Glassdoor (3.6/5, 20 reviews): career growth (4.1) and culture (3.8) score well ahead of work-life balance (2.7) and comp (3.0) — classic scale-up strain.

Sentiment confirms the rubric: strong on substance, thinner on delivery bandwidth. Get delivery-timeline and escalation commitments in writing before you sign anything beyond the core subscription.

IF YOU’RE BUILDING OR BUYING INDIRECT TAX CAPABILITY — HERE’S THE READ

For buyers

If you’re a Medium or Large B2B goods or services business centralising EU/UK VAT across multiple entities — especially if you’re newly exposed to France, Poland, Spain or Germany’s e-invoicing mandates — Marosa belongs on your shortlist. If you need one platform to cover US sales tax alongside VAT, look elsewhere. If you’re a small, self-serve buyer wanting transparent pricing and a same-day start, the sales-assisted-only funnel will frustrate you. Whatever your size, get the ISO 27001 certificate, an SLA, and a delivery-capacity commitment in writing before signing anything beyond the core subscription.

For prospective employees

Good move for tax-technology and product specialists: genuine AI investment (four working tools, not a slide) means real, current problems to work on.
Attractive if you like fast-moving, services-heavy environments: Praxity’s alliance channel and fresh PE capital point to real growth, not just talk.
Go in with eyes open on workload: Glassdoor’s work-life-balance (2.7) and comp (3.0) scores trail its culture and career scores — ask directly about hours and pay before joining.
No RepVue data exists to size up the sales org — if you’re evaluating a sales role, that’s a gap worth probing directly in interviews, not assuming away.

Buy Now

A selection of of opportunities to connect in person and interact online over the next few weeks

AUGUST 2026

The New Indirect Tax Technologist: A Skillset and Team Structure for the AI Era (Webinar)

Fonoa | 11 August 2026, 4:00pm CEST / 10:00am ET | Online

Tax leaders from NVIDIA, KPMG, and Fonoa discuss how to structure, hire, and upskill an indirect tax team that gets real value from AI — covering the emerging skillset and team design questions facing tax functions in the AI era.

SEPTEMBER 2026

E-Invoicing Compliance & Tax Technology Summit (Conference)

Tax Technology Summit | 2 September 2026 | Dubai, UAE

Event Page →

Audits & Appeals Seminar 2026 (Seminar)

TEI — Tax Executives Institute | 8–10 September 2026 | TBC

Shared Services & Outsourcing Week 2026 — Autumn (Conference)

SSON — Shared Services & Outsourcing Network | 14–17 September 2026 | San Diego, CA

SSON’s autumn flagship conference covering finance, tax, HR, and IT shared services transformation, with a focus on AI adoption, automation, and the future of the GBS operating model.

Avalara CRUSH 2026 (Conference)

Avalara | 22–24 September 2026 | Fort Lauderdale, FL

E-Invoicing Exchange Summit 2026 (Conference)

E-Invoicing Exchange | 30 September – 2 October 2026 | Hotel MOA Berlin, Berlin, Germany

Event Page →

*any organisers or events I’ve missed? please let me know.

A curated selection of blogs, white-papers and on demand content published by multiple organisartions across the landscape, organised into a themed learning path.

AUGUST 2026

Market Intelligence, AI, Agentic Governance & Audit Readiness

Week 1 · 4–8 August

Setting the Scene: Market Data, Regulatory Context & the AI Inflection Point

01📖 6 Insights from the 2026 Corporate Tax Technology Report Thomson Reuters / TEI 10–12 min

02📖 2026 Indirect Tax TrendsVertex Inc. 8–10 min

03📖 The Future of Tax: Connected Modeling and an AI-Enabled Tax Function KPMG 8–10 min

04📖 Sovos TaxScapes Q1 2026: Regulatory Changes in the Last 90 Days Sovos 10–12 min

05🎥Compliance Connect London 2026 — On-Demand Sessions Thomson Reuters / Pagero 90–120 min

06🎥 Sovos TaxScapes July 2026: What’s Changing in Indirect Tax — US and Global Sovos 45–60 min

Week total: 4 articles + 2 webinars · ~171–224 min (~2.5–3.5 hrs)

Week 2 · 11–15 August

AI Strategy, Agentic Governance & the Vendor Landscape

07📖 The Majority of CFOs Require Human Oversight of Agentic AI: 4 Governance Frameworks Anrok 12–15 min

08📖 AI Tools for Tax Professionals: Automate Smarter, Not Harder Sphere 10–12 min

09📖 AI for Indirect Tax: How Human-AI Collaboration Improves Compliance Fonoa 10–12 min

10📖 Best Sales Tax Software for SaaS Companies: 2026 Guide Kintsugi 12–15 min

11📖 5 Key Indirect Tax Trends from SYNAPSE 2026 Fonoa 10–12 min

12🎥 Beyond the Return: How AI and Automation Are Reshaping Tax Preparation Wolters Kluwer / CCH 50–60 min

Week total: 5 articles + 1 webinar · ~104–126 min (~1.75–2 hrs)

Week 3 · 18–22 August

Audit Readiness, Organisational Maturity & the Strategic Tax Function

13📖 Ready Before the Notice: A Sales Tax & VAT Audit Playbook Anrok / KPMG 20–25 min

14📖 Multi-State Tax Complexity: What Tax Teams Need to Know Wolters Kluwer / CCH 8–10 min

15📖 Beyond Compliance: How Tax Professionals Are Becoming Strategic Advisors Wolters Kluwer / CCH 8–10 min

16📖 Survive or Thrive? 2026 Will Test Tax Teams’ Limits Wolters Kluwer / CCH 6–8 min

17📖 Transforming Indirect Tax: 5 Insights from the 7th Annual VAT Management Summit Fonoa 10–12 min

18🎥From VAT Reporting to Real-Time Control: The New Era of VAT Compliance Sovos 45–60 min

Week total: 5 articles + 1 webinar · ~97–125 min (~1.5–2 hrs)

Week 4 · 25–29 August

Platform Strategy, the Vendor Market & the Indirect Tax Architecture Decision

19📖 Vertex Announces Strategic Investment in Kintsugi: Market Signal Vertex / Kintsugi 6–8 min

20📖 Tax Tech Strategy: Integrate Technology for Compliance Fonoa 10–12 min

21📖 Indirect Tax Transformation: Navigating Change, Embracing Technology Thomson Reuters 10–12 min

22📖 8 Best Cross-Border VAT Compliance Software: 2026 Guide Kintsugi 12–15 min

23🎥 Embracing the Future of Tax Compliance with AI Avalara 45–60 min

Week total: 4 articles + 1 webinar · ~83–107 min (~1.5 hrs)

August total: 18 articles + 5 webinars = 23 resources · ~455–582 min (~7.5–9.5 hrs)

*any cool content I’ve missed? please let me know.

A selection of open roles across tax tech vendors and tax advisory/consulting businesses who are involved in tax technology.

In house roles are provided courtesy of the smart people at https://taxjobs.ai

Use the column headers to sort, or the search function and don’t forget to navigate all pages!

*I do this using an AI agent and due to the volume, I don’t check every link, so please let me know if any of these don’t work or have disappeared when you follow them.

The Nexus Issue 17: AVASK

Nexus Tax Technology — Fri, 31 Jul 2026 07:01:29 GMT

This week in Taxtech

I’m back from holiday now so a little disconnected from the day to day but I’ve been working on a few improvements for the newsletter which I think you’ll love:

Firstly, thanks to those of you who contributed to last week’s poll regarding additional online learning content for the summer. The response was an overwhelming “yes we want more” so I’ve rewritten the program to double the content, which now contains around 9.5 hours of content across 23 sources, spanning multiple providers and topics.

Secondly, through a tie up with the smart people at taxjobs.ai I’m now able to share In House tax and taxtech roles alongside those at the vendors and firms, I think this is huge as it both expands the total number of opportunities I’m able to share as well as capturing roles that a lot of you are seeking in industry

Finally, I’ve been upgrading the underlying analyst reports so they are more nicely paginated and contain charts and colour coding to increase legibility of the quantitative data

I hope you enjoy those improvements, but before you get there, this week I’ve profiled AVASK yet another emerging player in the European VAT technology space.

AVASK: The Amazon Whisperer Trying to Become a Software Company

Amazon FBA sellers have known the AVASK name for a decade as the VAT-registration shop you call when a marketplace flags your listing. In February 2026, AVASK acquired SimplyVAT in a formally advised, real transaction — and it’s now selling itself as a “technology-led global compliance platform,” not an accounting firm with a helpline. As Amazon quietly reshuffles which tax agents it steers sellers toward, whether that repositioning is real or just a rebrand is the question worth answering now.

WHAT AVASK ACTUALLY IS

AVASK is a Southampton-based VAT, customs, and EPR compliance platform built for cross-border e-commerce and marketplace sellers, delivered through its proprietary Infiniti 3.0 platform (with a companion EPR engine, CiDATax). Its centre of gravity is Managed Services and Integration: registrations, filings, and national EPR-scheme representation across 50+ jurisdictions, wrapped around native API connections to more than 20 marketplaces — Amazon, Shopify, eBay, Walmart, Etsy, TikTok Shop, and more. Core regimes covered are UK/EU VAT and OSS/IOSS, US sales & use tax (via economic-nexus monitoring), customs and duties, and EPR/GPSR — with Canada GST/HST newly added via the SimplyVAT deal. There is no e-invoicing or CTC product. AVASK states it completes 500,000 VAT filings per year across an estimated 15,000–18,000+ clients, with roughly 150–270 staff and analyst-estimated ARR of US$40–60M. The natural longlist buyer: a goods-heavy, multi-country marketplace seller who wants VAT, customs, and EPR handled by one vendor instead of three.

WHERE IT BEATS THE MARKET BASELINE

AVASK’s integration roster — 20+ native marketplace connections, including several (TikTok Shop, Zalando, Back Market, bol.com, Allegro, Otto) that most VAT challengers simply don’t cover — is genuinely above baseline, and its customs/duties capability (HS classification, brokerage, import VAT reclaim) is a real differentiator most VAT-only competitors lack entirely. SOC 2 Type II certification is a credible security baseline for a services-heritage vendor. Where it sits at or below baseline: e-invoicing/CTC doesn’t exist as a product at all, AI is rules-based categorisation dressed in forward-looking language, and published entry pricing (~€93/month) diverges sharply from the quote-based reality once a seller needs more than one country — a pricing-transparency gap that shows up directly in customer reviews.

PORTFOLIO ANALYSIS

AVASK’s 2024 rename from “Accounting & Business Consultants” to “Global Compliance” tracks almost exactly with the Infiniti 3.0 launch — a portfolio built organically until the SimplyVAT acquisition broke that pattern. Compliance & Filing/Reporting is now estimated at roughly 55% of revenue, anchored to that 500,000-filings-per-year metric, with EPR/Customs/GPSR/consultancy at ~27% and calculation/integration/analytics splitting the rest. SimplyVAT adds ~73 VAT specialists and a Canada beachhead, but it’s a formally advised, structured deal (Northbound Group, DLA Piper, DMH Stallard) — not a leap into a new category. The operator read: this is a services business that has built real technology around its strongest existing workflows, not yet a technology business with a services option, and whether SimplyVAT becomes one platform or stays two branded silos is the thing to watch.

BUSINESS MODEL AND SIZE BAND FITS

Business model fit
B2B goods: 2 – Good fit — duties/EPR handling serves multi-country goods flows; not built for complex reverse-charge chains.
B2C goods: 3 – Strong fit — the core historical customer: marketplace-native goods sellers needing VAT, OSS/IOSS, customs, and EPR together.
B2B/B2C digital services: 1 – Patchy fit — the VAT engine technically covers OSS, but nothing in the product or marketing is built for this buyer.
B2B/B2C services (non-digital): 1 – Patchy fit — registration/filing helps, but the EPR/customs strength is irrelevant to this buyer.
Size band fit
Small: 2 – Good fit — self-serve entry pricing exists, but onboarding and true cost still skew toward assisted service.
Medium: 3 – Strong fit — the sweet spot: multi-country marketplace sellers needing VAT+EPR+Customs+GPSR bundled with the broadest integration roster in the category.
Large: 2 – Good fit — SOC 2 and multi-entity dashboards help, but no certified ERP add-on and no named SI/Big 4 partner cap the ceiling.

CUSTOMER AND EMPLOYEE SENTIMENTS

Customer sentiment is the largest independent sample seen across this profile series — and it’s consistent. Employee sentiment is genuinely mixed, and unusually well-documented for a vendor this size.

Trustpilot (~4.0/5, ~950–1,100 reviews): staff knowledge and dedicated account handling praised repeatedly; slow response times and delayed case resolution are the clearest recurring complaint.
G2 / Capterra / Gartner Peer Insights / TrustRadius: no profile found on any of them — a real diligence gap for buyers who start on structured review platforms.
Amazon seller forums (directional): sellers consistently rate AVASK above cheaper rivals like Avalara despite a real price premium.
Glassdoor (3.2/5, 82 reviews): WLB and individual colleagues praised; micromanagement and high turnover recur.
Indeed (2.6/5, 17 reviews): underpaid-for-workload and limited progression are the dominant themes.
RepVue: no profile — consistent with growth driven by Amazon SPN referral rather than a quota-carrying sales force.

The read: AVASK holds a Great Place to Work UK certification that sits oddly alongside its Glassdoor/Indeed scores — both can be true, but buyers relying on account-team continuity should weight the turnover signal, not the certificate.

IF YOU’RE BUILDING OR BUYING INDIRECT TAX CAPABILITY — HERE’S THE READ

For buyers: If you’re a Small or Medium goods-heavy marketplace seller — especially Amazon FBA — needing VAT, customs, and EPR handled by one vendor with genuinely wide marketplace connectivity, AVASK belongs on your shortlist. If you’re newly exposed to GPSR, the Responsible Person service bundled with VAT compliance is a real, uncommon convenience. If you’re a digital-services-only seller, don’t default here — nothing in the product is built for you, verify fit line-by-line before committing. If you’re an enterprise needing a certified SAP/NetSuite/Dynamics add-on, a named delivery partner, or any e-invoicing/CTC capability, treat AVASK as not-yet-ready and get the multi-country pricing model in writing before you sign anything.

For prospective employees:
Good move for compliance and account-management specialists who want hands-on, multi-country VAT/EPR/customs exposure at real operating scale.
Interesting for platform engineers working on Infiniti 3.0/CiDATax — genuine data-ingestion and rules-engine complexity, though AI/product-innovation culture is thin today.
Higher-risk in client-facing delivery roles given the Glassdoor/Indeed workload and turnover signals — probe team stability and escalation support directly in interviews.
Watch the SimplyVAT integration if you’re joining either brand: two separate operating structures today means real consolidation or restructuring risk over the next 12–24 months.
No RepVue data — sales-org health isn’t independently verifiable, though AVASK’s growth motion isn’t a traditional quota-carrying sales force in the first place.

Want the full 28 page analyst report?

A selection of of opportunities to connect in person and interact online over the next few weeks

AUGUST 2026

FTA Technology Conference and Expo 2026 (Conference)

Federation of Tax Administrators | 2–5 August 2026 | St. Louis Union Station, St. Louis, MO

The premier gathering for state tax administrators, software vendors, and compliance teams — a key venue for indirect tax automation vendors engaging directly with government decision-makers on emerging requirements.

Event Page →

Ready Before the Notice: A Sales Tax & VAT Audit Playbook (Webinar)

Anrok / KPMG / Fresh FP&A / OTTO-MATES | 5 August 2026, 10:00am PT / 1:00pm ET | Online

Anrok, KPMG, Fresh FP&A, and OTTO-MATES walk through every phase of a sales tax or VAT audit — nexus, taxability, exemptions, rate, and assessment — and what finance leaders should do at each step, including negotiating a proposed assessment before it becomes final.

US International Tax Course 2026 (Course)

TEI — Tax Executives Institute | 3–7 August 2026 | Seattle, WA

TEI’s intensive week-long course for in-house tax professionals covering the full spectrum of US international tax — from Subpart F and GILTI through FDII, BEAT, and transfer pricing — with substantial CPE credit available.

The New Indirect Tax Technologist: A Skillset and Team Structure for the AI Era (Webinar)

Fonoa | 11 August 2026, 4:00pm CEST / 10:00am ET | Online

SEPTEMBER 2026

E-Invoicing Compliance & Tax Technology Summit (Conference)

Tax Technology Summit | 2 September 2026 | Dubai, UAE

Event Page →

Audits & Appeals Seminar 2026 (Seminar)

TEI — Tax Executives Institute | 8–10 September 2026 | TBC

Shared Services & Outsourcing Week 2026 — Autumn (Conference)

SSON — Shared Services & Outsourcing Network | 14–17 September 2026 | San Diego, CA

SSON’s autumn flagship conference covering finance, tax, HR, and IT shared services transformation, with a focus on AI adoption, automation, and the future of the GBS operating model.

Avalara CRUSH 2026 (Conference)

Avalara | 22–24 September 2026 | Fort Lauderdale, FL

E-Invoicing Exchange Summit 2026 (Conference)

E-Invoicing Exchange | 30 September – 2 October 2026 | Hotel MOA Berlin, Berlin, Germany

Event Page →

*any organisers or events I’ve missed? please let me know.

A curated selection of blogs, white-papers and on demand content published by multiple organisartions across the landscape, organised into a themed learning path.

AUGUST 2026

Market Intelligence, AI, Agentic Governance & Audit Readiness

Week 1 · 4–8 August

Setting the Scene: Market Data, Regulatory Context & the AI Inflection Point

01📖 6 Insights from the 2026 Corporate Tax Technology Report Thomson Reuters / TEI 10–12 min

02📖 2026 Indirect Tax TrendsVertex Inc. 8–10 min

03📖 The Future of Tax: Connected Modeling and an AI-Enabled Tax Function KPMG 8–10 min

04📖 Sovos TaxScapes Q1 2026: Regulatory Changes in the Last 90 Days Sovos 10–12 min

05🎥Compliance Connect London 2026 — On-Demand Sessions Thomson Reuters / Pagero 90–120 min

06🎥 Sovos TaxScapes July 2026: What’s Changing in Indirect Tax — US and Global Sovos 45–60 min

Week total: 4 articles + 2 webinars · ~171–224 min (~2.5–3.5 hrs)

Week 2 · 11–15 August

AI Strategy, Agentic Governance & the Vendor Landscape

07📖 The Majority of CFOs Require Human Oversight of Agentic AI: 4 Governance Frameworks Anrok 12–15 min

08📖 AI Tools for Tax Professionals: Automate Smarter, Not Harder Sphere 10–12 min

09📖 AI for Indirect Tax: How Human-AI Collaboration Improves Compliance Fonoa 10–12 min

10📖 Best Sales Tax Software for SaaS Companies: 2026 Guide Kintsugi 12–15 min

11📖 5 Key Indirect Tax Trends from SYNAPSE 2026 Fonoa 10–12 min

12🎥 Beyond the Return: How AI and Automation Are Reshaping Tax Preparation Wolters Kluwer / CCH 50–60 min

Week total: 5 articles + 1 webinar · ~104–126 min (~1.75–2 hrs)

Week 3 · 18–22 August

Audit Readiness, Organisational Maturity & the Strategic Tax Function

13📖 Ready Before the Notice: A Sales Tax & VAT Audit Playbook Anrok / KPMG 20–25 min

14📖 Multi-State Tax Complexity: What Tax Teams Need to Know Wolters Kluwer / CCH 8–10 min

15📖 Beyond Compliance: How Tax Professionals Are Becoming Strategic Advisors Wolters Kluwer / CCH 8–10 min

16📖 Survive or Thrive? 2026 Will Test Tax Teams’ Limits Wolters Kluwer / CCH 6–8 min

17📖 Transforming Indirect Tax: 5 Insights from the 7th Annual VAT Management Summit Fonoa 10–12 min

18🎥From VAT Reporting to Real-Time Control: The New Era of VAT Compliance Sovos 45–60 min

Week total: 5 articles + 1 webinar · ~97–125 min (~1.5–2 hrs)

Week 4 · 25–29 August

Platform Strategy, the Vendor Market & the Indirect Tax Architecture Decision

19📖 Vertex Announces Strategic Investment in Kintsugi: Market Signal Vertex / Kintsugi 6–8 min

20📖 Tax Tech Strategy: Integrate Technology for Compliance Fonoa 10–12 min

21📖 Indirect Tax Transformation: Navigating Change, Embracing Technology Thomson Reuters 10–12 min

22📖 8 Best Cross-Border VAT Compliance Software: 2026 Guide Kintsugi 12–15 min

23🎥 Embracing the Future of Tax Compliance with AI Avalara 45–60 min

Week total: 4 articles + 1 webinar · ~83–107 min (~1.5 hrs)

August total: 18 articles + 5 webinars = 23 resources · ~455–582 min (~7.5–9.5 hrs)

*any cool content I’ve missed? please let me know.

A selection of open roles across tax tech vendors and tax advisory/consulting businesses who are involved in tax technology.

In house roles are provided courtesy of the smart people at https://taxjobs.ai

Use the column headers to sort, or the search function and don’t forget to navigate all pages!

*I do this using an AI agent and due to the volume, I don’t check every link, so please let me know if any of these don’t work or have disappeared when you follow them.

✌ Last thoughts

Thanks again for reading! If you have any feedback, suggestions, want to contribute, share news or would like to work together in any way, email me here or hit the button below! And if you haven’t already, please subscribe to get The Nexus each and every Friday!

The Nexus Issue 16: SB122 - Calfiornia SaaS's Impact on the Taxtech Market

Nexus Tax Technology — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 07:01:08 GMT

This week in Taxtech

Looks like holiday mode has been activated across the industry so news is realtively thin and i’ve been heads down working on a major upgrade for the newsletter that I know you’re going to love!

I’ve also been scouring the space trying to find some additional upcoming events over the summer without a great deal of luck, hwowver I did find 2 interesting webinars from Fonoa and Fintua. In lieu of much scheduled activity here, I’m wondering if you all would value an increased online learning program for august, let me know by clicking below:

Outside of this i’ve been seeing a lot of promotion around the new California SaaS taxability legislation SB122, like this one from Anrok . This would have been just the thing that got my sales and marketing teams excited previously and it got me thinking about how it actually impacts the wider market and how I can help put buyers and sellers together, which is after all the mission of the nexus.

So below is the main article, if anyone wants help directly connecting to buyers or sellers, message me here…

⭐ California’s SaaS Tax: SB 122, Nexus Creation, and the Next Tax Tech Demand Wave

Executive summary

California just turned one of the largest software markets in the world into a new SaaS tax event. That is the signal. The noise is everything else.

SB 122 matters because it does two things at once. It expands California sales and use tax to digital prewritten software and SaaS from 1 January 2027, and it makes SaaS revenue count toward California’s existing $500,000 economic nexus threshold for remote sellers. The first point changes taxability. The second creates the market opportunity.

Using the state’s own revenue assumptions, California appears to be targeting roughly $20 billion to $24 billion of annual taxable software and SaaS spend. A base-case model suggests roughly 2,520 newly nexus-triggered SaaS vendors globally, with 1,386 in the U.S. and 1,134 outside it . That in turn creates a California-only Year 1 tax technology TAM of roughly $44.9 million, where Year 1 includes registrations, filing setup, and engine or configuration projects, followed by a much smaller Year 2 TAM of roughly $4.5 million that is mostly onward filing and recurring compliance work.

The vendors best placed to benefit are not necessarily the vendors with the deepest enterprise tax stacks. Major suites such as Vertex, Thomson Reuters, Sovos, and Avalara have the scale and product depth to capture complex downstream work, but the challenger cohort - including Kintsugi, Anrok, Sphere, Numeral, and Taxwire — is structurally closer to the newly triggered, digital-native SaaS vendor base that SB 122 is most likely to activate first.

The bigger punchline sits one layer out. California is not another Wayfair, but it could be the most important SaaS tax precedent since Wayfair created the current nexus framework. If additional non-taxing states adopt California-style SaaS treatment, the California-only TAM model scales into a much larger multi-state opportunity.

Overview of SB 122

Starting on 1 January 2027, California will apply sales and use tax to digital prewritten software, including software accessed remotely as SaaS. The old distinction between software delivered on physical media and software delivered remotely is effectively gone.

The statewide base rate remains 7.25%, with local district taxes increasing the effective rate depending on customer location. Custom software remains exempt, which means some services-heavy and modification-heavy statements of work still sit outside the taxable base, but most standard subscription software sold into California becomes taxable.

For operators, this is not just a rate change. It is a product-taxability, billing, contracting, data, and filing problem arriving on a fixed deadline.

Place in the context of Wayfair

Wayfair was the structural reset. It changed who states could tax by allowing economic nexus without physical presence, and it touched remote commerce across the U.S. economy. Revenue estimates tied to Wayfair commonly referenced $8.5 billion to $13.4 billion of previously uncollected tax and a registration wave measured in the hundreds of thousands.

SB 122 is smaller, but sharper. It does not create a new nexus doctrine. It changes what counts inside California’s existing nexus framework by making SaaS revenue taxable and countable. That is why the effect is measured in thousands of vendors, not hundreds of thousands.

It is still strategically important because California is not a marginal state in software. It is one of the biggest software buying markets anywhere. When California flips from exempt to taxable, the market notices.

Tax revenue estimates and implied SaaS spend

California’s own numbers provide the clearest anchor. The state projects roughly $900 million of annual General Fund revenue and $1.1 billion of local sales tax revenue once SB 122 is fully in effect, or about $2.0 billion annually in total.

Back into that using a blended effective rate of roughly 8.5% to 10%, and the implied taxable software and SaaS base lands at about $20 billion to $24 billion per year. That is the spend pool the state appears to believe it can reach.

For tax technology vendors, that number matters less as a forecasting endpoint than as a confidence signal. California has effectively told the market that the taxable base is large enough to justify major policy change and meaningful enforcement attention.

Modelled new SaaS vendor nexus estimates

The key commercial mechanic is the nexus threshold. California already has a $500,000 economic nexus rule for remote sellers, but SaaS revenue historically did not count because SaaS was not taxable. SB 122 changes that.

Using a global SaaS company base of roughly 42,000 and applying filters for meaningful California exposure, likely absence of existing California nexus, and the probability of crossing the threshold once SaaS is included, the base-case model produces about 2,520 newly nexus-triggered SaaS vendors globally. The low-high range runs from roughly 1,260 to 4,410.

That wave is not just domestic. In the base case, roughly 1,386 vendors are U.S.-based and 1,134 are non-U.S. vendors . The largest non-U.S. contributors are the United Kingdom, Canada, India, and Germany.

Tax technology TAM methodology and estimates

The California-only TAM model is intentionally simple and operator-friendly. Year 1 includes the first-wave spending categories that are most likely to activate once a vendor becomes taxable in California: registration, filing setup, tax engine configuration, taxability mapping, billing and ERP changes, and adjacent quote-to-cash or contracting work. Year 2 strips the model back to onward filing and recurring compliance activity, which is why it is much smaller.

The calculation logic works in three steps. First, estimate the newly nexus-triggered vendor count by filtering the global SaaS company base for meaningful California exposure, then removing vendors likely to already have California nexus from other taxable activity, then applying a threshold-crossing assumption once SaaS revenue becomes countable. Second, apply an average Year 1 activation spend per newly triggered vendor covering registration, setup, engine configuration, and adjacent workflow changes, plus a smaller recurring Year 2 filing and compliance spend. Third, aggregate those vendor-level assumptions across the low, base, and high scenarios to produce total TAM.

In formula form, the simplified model is: new nexus vendors × average Year 1 activation spend = Year 1 TAM, and new nexus vendors × average recurring compliance spend = Year 2 TAM . This is important because SB 122 is less about selling entirely new tax engines into greenfield accounts than about expanding existing tax operations into a newly taxable category. The real prize is the implementation wave, not the annuity.

A practical way to read the base case is this: California creates roughly $44.9 million of Year 1 TAM and roughly $4.5 million of Year 2 TAM, with the gap between those numbers representing the one-time surge in activation work . That is why timing matters. The market is likely to be most intense in the run-up to 1 January 2027 and the first filing cycles after go-live.

For buyers, the practical implication is straightforward: the first-year cost of getting California right is likely to be lumpy rather than linear . A newly nexus-triggered SaaS vendor should expect a Year 1 spend envelope that combines registration, initial returns setup, tax engine or billing configuration, and some level of advisory or implementation support, with the base-case model implying an average cost in the high four figures to low five figures per affected vendor before settling into a much smaller ongoing annual filing and compliance cost in Year 2. In plain terms, this is more likely to feel like a short activation project than a simple filing fee.

Breakdown by vendor geography

The geography split is part of the signal. This is not just a California-to-U.S. compliance story. It is also a cross-border software revenue story.

The UK leads the non-U.S. group because it combines one of the largest SaaS vendor bases outside the U.S. with strong export orientation into California and the wider U.S. enterprise market. Canada, India, and Germany follow for different reasons: Canada for U.S. commercial adjacency, India for sheer SaaS scale, and Germany for enterprise software density.

Breakdown by main buyer verticals and main vendor categories

The buyer-side story is not evenly distributed. Some sectors sit at the centre of the California software tax event because they buy more enterprise SaaS, centralise procurement more aggressively, and rely more heavily on software categories that will now become taxable.

On the vendor category side, CRM and ERP dominate by spend, while cybersecurity has one of the strongest dispositions toward nexus triggering because many security vendors sell internationally into U.S. enterprises at relatively high contract values. HR/HCM/LMS matters more than it might look at first glance because learning, onboarding, compliance training, and workforce development are increasingly part of a wider employee-software estate rather than a standalone niche. The added growth lens sharpens the commercial picture: cybersecurity and finance/billing screen as the fastest-growing slices of the SB122-created opportunity, while CRM and ERP remain the biggest in absolute dollars.

Positioning of tax technology vendors to capture the market

The SB 122 opportunity is unevenly distributed by vendor positioning. That is where the market gets interesting.

The major suites — Vertex, Thomson Reuters, Sovos, and Avalara — bring brand recognition, product breadth, and stronger fit for complex indirect tax environments. But that does not mean they are equally well placed to capture the first wave of newly nexus-triggered SaaS vendors. Vertex, Thomson Reuters, and Sovos are stronger where the use case is already complex, cross-border, ERP-heavy, or embedded in a broader tax operating model. Avalara is better positioned than the other large suites for the earlier activation layer because it has more natural reach across SMB, mid-market, registrations, returns, and quicker deployment patterns.

The challenger cohort should be treated as one strategic group here: Anrok, Kintsugi, Sphere, Numeral, and Taxwire. These vendors are structurally closer to the digital-native SaaS cohort likely to be created by SB 122 because they are more aligned to lighter implementations, faster onboarding, registration-led motions, and software-native workflows.

The commercial implication is not that challengers are bigger today, the implication is that they may have higher growth potential inside the specific slice of demand SB 122 creates, because that slice is more likely to resemble a newly activated SaaS compliance workflow than a full enterprise tax transformation programme. Major suites are still likely to capture the higher-complexity and larger-account work, especially after the first wave, but challengers appear better placed to win speed-sensitive, digitally native, net-new nexus demand in the first phase.

States with and without SaaS taxability — and why that changes the TAM story

California matters more because it is not arriving into a blank map. As of 2025-2026, around 24 to 25 U.S. jurisdictions tax SaaS in some form, while a meaningful group of states still generally does not, and five states have no statewide sales tax at all. California flipping from non-taxable to taxable is therefore not just a local revenue event. It is one of the largest green-to-blue moves left on the map.

That matters for TAM because the California model scales. If one of the biggest software markets in the country moves into the taxable column, it sharpens the case for further moves elsewhere and gives tax technology vendors a working playbook for registration, configuration, and filing activation. Earlier modelling suggested that if five additional large states adopted California-style SaaS treatment, the Year 1 TAM could rise into the $180 million to $270 million range, and if the remaining non-taxing states followed over time, the Year 1 TAM could reach roughly $450 million to $720 million.

The state map therefore is not just descriptive. It is a forward-looking TAM lens. Every grey state is a potential future California, and California has just become the most visible proof point in the market.

Larger states still left to implement matter most. Florida, North Carolina, Georgia, Virginia, and Michigan stand out because they combine economic scale, meaningful enterprise software spend, and enough seller volume to create a noticeable second-wave TAM if they follow California’s lead.

Conclusions

SB 122 is not another Wayfair. It does not need to be. It is the clearest state-level SaaS tax expansion with real commercial force in one of the largest software markets anywhere.

The base-case signal is clear: roughly 2,520 newly nexus-triggered SaaS vendors globally, a California-only Year 1 TAM of roughly $44.9 million, a much smaller Year 2 TAM once the implementation wave passes, and a split of demand that is material both inside and outside the United States .

The strategic split is just as clear. CRM, ERP, cybersecurity, collaboration, and HR/HCM/LMS sit at the heart of the category opportunity; technology, financial services, manufacturing, healthcare, and retail sit at the heart of the buyer-side opportunity; and challengers may be better positioned than some major suites to capture the first wave of newly activated demand.

California has moved one of the biggest software markets in the country from exempt to taxable. The vendors that treat that as a filing update will miss the point. The vendors that treat it as an activation moment will not.

Implications and recommendations for buyers

For buyers — meaning SaaS vendors that will newly incur California nexus or enterprises that will feel the impact through vendor invoices and procurement workflows — the practical implications are immediate.

Treat this as a revenue-operations issue, not just a tax issue. Product taxability, billing logic, customer address quality, and contract language all sit upstream of the filing process.
Model exposure now, not in Q4 2026. The key question is whether California SaaS revenue pushes the business over the $500,000 threshold and which product lines or bundled charges are affected.
Segment the product catalogue. Prewritten subscription software, custom work, implementation services, training, and modifications should not be treated as one bucket if the goal is defensible tax treatment and better audit posture.
Stress-test billing and quoting workflows. Businesses need to know whether tax is added cleanly at the right point in the quote-to-cash flow and whether invoices can distinguish taxable and non-taxable lines where needed.
Expect vendor conversations to change. Buyers using tax engines or tax advisors should ask explicitly how California SaaS treatment will be configured, who owns registration timing, and whether current workflows are built for a state-by-state SaaS taxability map rather than a single rule.
Use California as the template state. Even if the immediate exposure is only California, the smart move is to design the operating model for repeatability in case more states follow.

The operator-grade recommendation is simple: build for the second state while solving the first one. That is how California stops being a one-off headache and becomes a reusable compliance capability.

Recommendations for sellers (taxtech GTM)

Build target lists around SaaS vendors most likely to cross California’s $500k nexus threshold, prioritising companies with meaningful California revenue concentration and limited legacy sales‑tax infrastructure.
Focus demand generation on the highest-signal categories:
- CRM and ERP for absolute dollar opportunity,
- Cybersecurity and finance/billing for the fastest‑growing SB 122‑driven demand and sharpest urgency.
Think about the impacted horizontal and vertical SaaS castegories and vendors that sell into California’s taxable base, led by Tech, FS, Manufacturing, Life Sciences, Retail.
Treat non‑U.S. SaaS vendors as a primary segment, not a side case, given the large cross‑border cohort (particularly UK, Canada, India, Germany) that is likely to newly trigger California nexus.
Build messaging that explicitly speaks to tax, finance, RevOps, and billing stakeholders together, because implementation risk and effort will sit across systems rather than inside the tax team alone.
Use California as the entry point to a broader multi‑state narrative, especially in larger non‑taxing states such as Florida, North Carolina, Georgia, Georgia, Virginia, and Michigan, where future imitation of SB 122 would materially expand TAM.

Want help engaging vendors or potential customers?

A selection of of opportunities to connect in person and interact online over the next few weeks

JULY 2026

E-Invoicing Is Coming Fast: Are Your Tax Processes Actually Ready? (Webinar)

Vertex, Inc. | 9 July 2026, 15:00–16:00 CEST | Online

A live webcast examining why SAP Document and Reporting Compliance alone isn’t enough for e-invoicing readiness, covering the process and data gaps organisations commonly overlook before mandates go live.

NAEA Tax Summit 2026 (Conference)

National Association of Enrolled Agents | 27–29 July 2026 | New Orleans Marriott, New Orleans, LA

NAEA’s flagship in-person event for tax practitioners, including a dedicated Practice Management Bootcamp track covering the tools, workflows, and automation strategies powering efficient firms today.

Event Page →

Prompt Engineering for Tax Teams: Hands-On AI Lab (Virtual Workshop)

TEI — Tax Executives Institute | 29 July 2026 | Virtual

A hands-on session for in-house tax professionals on applying prompt engineering techniques directly to tax workflows — practical AI skills rather than theory.

France 2026 eInvoicing: From Compliance to Operational Readiness (Webinar)

Fintua | 30 July 2026, 10:00 GMT+1 | Online

A practical session on moving from France’s e-invoicing compliance requirements to genuine operational readiness, ahead of the phased mandate taking effect from 1 September 2026 for large and mid-sized companies.

AUGUST 2026

FTA Technology Conference and Expo 2026 (Conference)

Federation of Tax Administrators | 2–5 August 2026 | St. Louis Union Station, St. Louis, MO

Event Page →

US International Tax Course 2026 (Course)

TEI — Tax Executives Institute | 3–7 August 2026 | Seattle, WA

The New Indirect Tax Technologist: A Skillset and Team Structure for the AI Era (Webinar)

Fonoa | 11 August 2026, 4:00pm CEST / 10:00am ET | Online

*any organisers or events I’ve missed? please let me know.

A curated selection of blogs, white-papers and on demand content published by multiple organisartions across the landscape, organised into a themed learning path.

MONTH TWO · JULY 2026

E-Invoicing, CTC & the Live Mandate Landscape

Belgium is in full enforcement. France’s September 2026 deadline is six weeks away. Poland’s KSeF soft-landing period is closing. Norway has just accelerated its mandatory timeline. Brazil’s dual-VAT transition is live. Comarch, Basware, Marosa, Innovate Tax, and Sovos are the specialist lenses for this month — alongside Fonoa and Vertex for the platform and maturity dimensions.

Week 1 · 6–10 July

The Global CTC Landscape: What 80+ Live Mandates Actually Look Like

📖Continuous Transaction Controls: The Future of Compliance Sovos 12–15 min

📖Streamline the Future #6: Reporting Built for Global E-Invoicing Operations Comarch 8–10 min

📖2025 in Review: 5 Trends That Defined the Indirect Tax Industry Innovate Tax 8–10 min

Week total: 3 articles · ~28–35 min

Week 2 · 13–17 July

ViDA, Belgium & the European Mandate Wave

Basware’s recently confirmed accreditation as a certified French PDP (Plateforme de Dématérialisation Partenaire) makes it one of the most credible voices on France’s September 2026 mandate. The Comarch / Forrester webinar from January 2026 remains the most authoritative external analysis of the global e-invoicing technology landscape — covering GenAI, agentic AI, Peppol, and the 2026–2027 mandate timeline in 60 minutes.

📖 What is ViDA? VAT in the Digital Age Initiative Q&A Pagero (Thomson Reuters) 12–15 min

📖5 Things We Can Learn from Belgium’s 2026 E-Invoicing Mandate Innovate Tax 8–10 min

🎥E-Invoicing Trends and Obligations: 2026 and Beyond (feat. Forrester) Comarch / Forrester 60 min

Week total: 2 articles + 1 webinar · ~80–85 min

Week 3 · 20–24 July

Emerging Markets & Platform Architecture: Brazil, Norway & Building for Scale

Brazil’s 2026 CBS/IBS tax reform is the most structurally significant emerging market e-invoicing development of the year — Fonoa’s guide is the most accessible and detailed available for non-specialists. Marosa’s country monitoring brings a European VAT compliance partner’s practical lens on the mandates moving fastest right now (Norway’s just-announced acceleration, Spain’s reactivated B2B requirement). Vertex’s platform consolidation argument provides the architectural counterpoint.

📖Brazil 2026 Tax Reform: Key E-Invoicing Changes Fonoa 10–12 min

📖E-Invoicing in Norway and Latest European VAT Updates Marosa VAT 8–10 min

📖Leading the Charge: E-Invoicing as the Cornerstone of Future Compliance Vertex Inc. 10–12 min

Week total: 3 articles · ~28–34 min

Week 4 · 27–31 July

The Buyer’s Market: Evaluating VAT & E-Invoicing Tools Across the Vendor Spectrum

This week deliberately introduces the buyer’s perspective — how do you navigate a market that now runs from $49/month Quaderno for SaaS B2C through to Comarch, EDICOM, and Basware serving Fortune 500 multinationals? Kintsugi’s cross-border VAT guide maps the mid-market options clearly. The Sovos webinar provides the live regulatory update that anchors the month. Avalara’s AI webinar closes the loop on how automation is being embedded into compliance workflows in 2026.

📖8 Best Cross-Border VAT Compliance Software: 2026 Guide Kintsugi 12–15 min

🎥VAT Snapshot: From Poland to the UAE — Preparing for 2026 Mandates Sovos 45–60 min

🎥Embracing the Future of Tax Compliance with AI Avalara 45–60 min

Week total: 1 article + 2 webinars · ~102–135 min

Month Two total: 9 articles + 3 webinars · ~238–289 min

*any cool content I’ve missed? please let me know.

A selection of open roles across tax tech vendors and tax advisory/consulting businesses who are involved in tax technology.

Use the column headers to sort, or the search function and don’t forget to navigate all pages!

*I do this using an AI agent and due to the volume, I don’t check every link, so please let me know if any of these don’t work or have disappeared when you follow them.

✌ Last thoughts

Thanks again for reading! If you have any feedback, suggestions, want to contribute, share gossip or would like to work together in any way, email me here or hit the button below! And if you haven’t already, please subscribe to get The Nexus each and every Friday!

The Nexus Issue 15: VATIT

Nexus Tax Technology — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 07:30:35 GMT

This week in Taxtech

I’m on holiday in Cornwall this week and trying to limit the amount of time I spend on tax technology, so this issue is pre-prepared and if you’ve messaged me I’ll be in touch soon I promise!

That said, I think this week’s vendor spotlight lands on an interesting company VATIT. I enjoyed looking at them and I hope you enjoy it too.

Do message me if you’d like a copy of this - or any other - long form (c30 page) vendor report.

⭐ Vendor Spotlight: VATIT

VAT IT: The Reclaim Machine Becoming a Compliance Platform

Twenty-five years of clawing back travel VAT has funded something bigger: a real compliance and e-invoicing platform. As the next mandate waves turn compliance into infrastructure, the question is whether VAT IT’s software has caught up to its pitch — or whether this is still a services business wearing a platform’s clothes.

What VAT IT Actually Is

VAT IT runs three products: Cloud automates VAT reclaim via AI-assisted expense matching; Abacus handles VAT/GST registration, filing, and reporting across ~50 countries; eezi covers e-invoicing across 60+ countries, backed by a genuine French PDP accreditation. Add a full US sales tax managed service and you’ve got a services-led operation built for multinationals with real cross-border spend, not a self-serve tool. Privately held and founder-led (CEO Lourens van Pletzen), ~1,000–1,500+ core staff, with enough throughput that Navan alone funnelled $300m in reclaims last year. Want reclaim, compliance, and e-invoicing under one partner? This belongs on your longlist.

Where It Beats the Baseline

Against the market baseline — accurate calculation, broad coverage, e-invoicing where mandated, solid integrations, clean audit trail — VAT IT clears the bar on coverage and audit trail: 100+ tax-authority relationships and a legal team that fights rejected claims rather than writing them off. eezi’s French PDP accreditation is real, not vapour, and its Ramp/Brex/SAP Concur/Navan partnerships capture reclaim data at the point of spend — a genuine edge most peers lack. Security (ISO 27001:2022, ISO 22301, SOC 2 Type II) beats younger rivals. Below baseline: calculation-engine depth is thin and bundled, and there’s essentially no AI beyond marketing language.

Portfolio Analysis

This is a services-first-then-software story, not a rollup. No acquisitions sit in the current five-year window — the one confirmed deal, Meridian VAT Reclaim (2017), predates it — and capital flows the other way: VAT IT Ventures spins businesses out (WTax, withholding tax) rather than buying capability in. Revenue still leans on the original contingency-fee reclaim business (~45% in ‘other’), with compliance filing fastest-growing (~30%) and e-invoicing smaller but accelerating hardest given the 2026 mandate wave. Takeaway: a broad, credentialed platform stitched from three separately-logged-into products, not one codebase — ask how data moves between Cloud, Abacus, and eezi before buying the ‘one powerhouse’ pitch.

Business Model and Size-Band Fit

Business model fit:

• B2B goods: 2 – Good fit; strong for multinationals needing reclaim plus compliance, less tuned to digital-native e-commerce.
• B2C goods: 1 – Patchy fit; some retail on Abacus, not built for self-serve small-seller onboarding.
• B2B/B2C digital services: 1 – Patchy fit; a few tech logos emerging, but no embeddable calc engine.
• B2B/B2C services: 3 – Strong fit; the historical core — aviation, entertainment, consulting, T&E-heavy and jurisdictionally messy.

Size band fit:

• Small: 1 – Patchy fit; managed-service cost floor doesn’t suit low cross-border spend.
• Medium: 2 – Good fit; multi-jurisdiction breadth and bundled pricing make sense at material spend.
• Large: 3 – Strong fit; authority relationships, security, and expense-platform partnerships all compound at scale.

Customer and Employee Sentiment

Customer sentiment is the thinnest part of this story — not bad, just barely measured. No meaningful G2, Capterra, or TrustRadius footprint for a 25-year, 13,000+ client vendor is a real diligence gap.

• Trustpilot: 3.0/5, only 3 reviews — too small to trust either way.
• G2 / Capterra: not listed; ask for references and call them.
• Vendor testimonials: positive on reclaim persistence and account continuity, but vendor-selected.
• Glassdoor: 3.3/5 overall (209–211 reviews) — culture (3.6) and WLB (3.4) hold up; comp (2.4) and career progression (2.8) don’t.
• RepVue: not fully ranked, but Product-Market Fit sits at 4.6/5 — reps believe in the pitch.

Operator read: the account-management layer looks solid; the larger processing-centre workforce beneath it looks higher-turnover — ask about account-team tenure before assuming continuity.

If You’re X, Do Y

If you’re Large with genuine cross-border T&E, AP, or supply-chain VAT exposure — aviation, entertainment, service-heavy verticals — shortlist VAT IT and lean into the managed-service model. If you’re Medium B2B goods with real but not massive cross-border spend, it’s reasonable once cost makes sense, but push on how Cloud, Abacus, and eezi share data before signing. If you’re a bootstrapped digital-native seller wanting a self-serve, API-native calc engine, wrong lane — heavy, slow to onboard, priced for a different customer. If G2/Capterra scores drive your shortlist, budget time for direct reference calls instead.

For prospective employees:

• Account-management and specialist roles look like the best seats in the house — real relationship depth, long tenures, genuine complexity.
• Processing-centre and associate roles carry real ‘stepping stone’ risk: Glassdoor and Indeed flag limited progression and below-market pay.
• RepVue’s Product-Market Fit (4.6/5) suggests the sales pitch is real, even without attainment data to back it up.
• Founder-led, privately held, running its own venture studio, not a PE rollup — less M&A reorg risk than a Sovos or Avalara, less capital cushion if reclaim volumes soften.

Want the full 35 page analyst report?

A selection of of opportunities to connect in person and interact online over the next few weeks

JULY 2026

NAEA Tax Summit 2026 (Conference) | National Association of Enrolled Agents | 27–29 July 2026 | New Orleans Marriott, New Orleans, LA

Event Page →

Prompt Engineering for Tax Teams: Hands-On AI Lab (Virtual Workshop) | TEI — Tax Executives Institute | 29 July 2026 | Virtual

A hands-on session for in-house tax professionals on applying prompt engineering techniques directly to tax workflows — practical AI skills rather than theory.

AUGUST 2026

FTA Technology Conference and Expo 2026 (Conference) | Federation of Tax Administrators | 2–5 August 2026 | St. Louis Union Station, St. Louis, MO

Event Page →

US International Tax Course 2026 (Course) | TEI — Tax Executives Institute | 3–7 August 2026 | Seattle, WA

*any organisers or events I’ve missed? please let me know.

A curated selection of blogs, white-papers and on demand content published by multiple organisartions across the landscape, organised into a themed learning path.

MONTH TWO · JULY 2026

E-Invoicing, CTC & the Live Mandate Landscape

Week 1 · 6–10 July

The Global CTC Landscape: What 80+ Live Mandates Actually Look Like

📖Continuous Transaction Controls: The Future of Compliance Sovos 12–15 min

📖Streamline the Future #6: Reporting Built for Global E-Invoicing Operations Comarch 8–10 min

📖2025 in Review: 5 Trends That Defined the Indirect Tax Industry Innovate Tax 8–10 min

Week total: 3 articles · ~28–35 min

Week 2 · 13–17 July

ViDA, Belgium & the European Mandate Wave

📖 What is ViDA? VAT in the Digital Age Initiative Q&A Pagero (Thomson Reuters) 12–15 min

📖5 Things We Can Learn from Belgium’s 2026 E-Invoicing Mandate Innovate Tax 8–10 min

🎥E-Invoicing Trends and Obligations: 2026 and Beyond (feat. Forrester) Comarch / Forrester 60 min

Week total: 2 articles + 1 webinar · ~80–85 min

Week 3 · 20–24 July

Emerging Markets & Platform Architecture: Brazil, Norway & Building for Scale

📖Brazil 2026 Tax Reform: Key E-Invoicing Changes Fonoa 10–12 min

📖E-Invoicing in Norway and Latest European VAT Updates Marosa VAT 8–10 min

📖Leading the Charge: E-Invoicing as the Cornerstone of Future Compliance Vertex Inc. 10–12 min

Week total: 3 articles · ~28–34 min

Week 4 · 27–31 July

The Buyer’s Market: Evaluating VAT & E-Invoicing Tools Across the Vendor Spectrum

📖8 Best Cross-Border VAT Compliance Software: 2026 Guide Kintsugi 12–15 min

🎥VAT Snapshot: From Poland to the UAE — Preparing for 2026 Mandates Sovos 45–60 min

🎥Embracing the Future of Tax Compliance with AI Avalara 45–60 min

Week total: 1 article + 2 webinars · ~102–135 min

Month Two total: 9 articles + 3 webinars · ~238–289 min

*any cool content I’ve missed? please let me know.

A selection of open roles across tax tech vendors and tax advisory/consulting businesses who are involved in tax technology.

Use the column headers to sort, or the search function and don’t forget to navigate all pages!

v*I do this using an AI agent and due to the volume, I don’t check every link, so please let me know if any of these don’t work or have disappeared when you follow them.

✌ Last thoughts

The Nexus Issue 14: UK E-invoicing & LOVAT

Nexus Tax Technology — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 07:01:43 GMT

Compliance Isn’t Coming. It’s Already Being Sold.

April 2029 feels distant until you notice how loud the market already is.

HMRC confirmed Peppol as the UK’s e-invoicing backbone on 23 June 2026. Within days, dozens of vendors had a blog post ready. Most of them said the same thing.

Here’s the split that actually matters: who’s shipped something real in the UK, and who’s just SEO-ing the mandate. Twenty-one organisations we tracked have said something UK-specific. A handful have said something that would survive an RFP.

The Numbers Behind the Noise

Start with the one number HMRC actually counted: 342 consultation responses between February and May 2025 — 259 UK-only, 203 businesses (141 of them sub-250-employee SMEs, 40 large enterprises), the rest advisers and trade bodies.

Everything after that is vendor noise, and the noise has a shape. Across six cohorts — tax engines, e-invoicing specialists, VAT-tech challengers, SME accounting platforms, Big 4, professional bodies — 21 organisations have published genuinely UK-specific content since Budget 2025: four tax engines, four e-invoicing specialists, four challenger firms, three accounting platforms, three of the Big 4, three associations.

Now the gap. Zero of the three major ERP vendors — SAP, Microsoft, Oracle/NetSuite — has made a first-party UK statement. One of the Big 4 (PwC) has published nothing UK-specific we could find. Biggest balance sheets, quietest press office. Remember that when a systems integrator tells you your ERP vendor “has it covered.”

And the number that should worry HMRC more than any of the above: roughly 40% of UK businesses don’t know this mandate exists, and over 90% have seen zero direct communication from HMRC about it. Billentis pegs global e-invoice penetration at just 29% of roughly 300 billion B2B invoices expected in 2026. Twenty-one vendors publishing at full volume, into a market where nine in ten businesses haven’t had the conversation yet.

Tax Engines: Vertex, Avalara, Pagero/Thomson Reuters, Sovos

Vertex has UK content — a “why VAT businesses must prepare” piece, a steady drip of regulatory alerts — that reads as e-invoicing bolted onto the existing VAT Compliance module: reconciliation, status tracking, the usual. Avalara’s play is standards alignment, EN 16931 folded into a pan-European tracker rather than owned as a UK story, though it does sit as one of the certified providers wired into Microsoft Dynamics 365’s Peppol connectivity. Pagero — now folded entirely into Thomson Reuters as ONESOURCE Pagero — carries the NHS’s invoicing modernisation as a live reference case, plus accreditation across every Peppol jurisdiction. Sovos was fastest off the blocks with content, but its real substance is structural: the embedded engine inside QuickBooks/Intuit’s UK product, paired technically with Tungsten Automation on tax-plus-AP.

Signal: two of four are real, two are commentary. Pagero/Thomson Reuters has shipped, large-scale UK infrastructure (the NHS deployment); Sovos is functionally embedded inside a live UK product most of the market already uses. Vertex and Avalara have said the mandate is important — accurate, and not a position.

E-Invoicing Specialists: Basware, Tungsten Automation, Tradeshift, Comarch

Basware is an accredited Peppol access point that’s actually built the Peppol Invoice Response Message — real protocol engineering — and has been buying AP-automation capability (Redmap, AP Matching) to round out the stack. Tungsten leans on country-coverage breadth and its Sovos tie-up. Comarch has simply out-published everyone, with a dedicated UK page tracking the consultation, the Budget and the Peppol confirmation in turn. Tradeshift is named as a direct participant in the UK eInvoicing Advocacy Lab.

Signal: Tradeshift wins this cohort outright — a seat in the room writing the rules beats every competitor’s forward-looking blog post, and it’s the most substantive “response” available to anyone before Budget 2026 drops the actual spec. Basware backs its claims with genuine engineering; Tungsten and Comarch are competent but undifferentiated.

The Challengers:

Fonoa is a certified OpenPeppol member, accredited to run both a Peppol Access Point and a Service Metadata Publisher, with a dedicated UK guide. Marosa VAT and Fintua have both stayed current on the consultation and Budget cycle, with Fintua folding e-invoicing into a broader VAT-compliance-plus-recovery-plus-payments suite. VATCalc — built by ex-Avalara executive Richard Asquith — offers a live product (e-invoicing reconciled against VAT returns across 30+ countries) and a sharp independent read in the landscape: its framing of the Peppol decision as an “efficiency drive” rather than a tax-gap play is genuinely contrarian.

Signal: only one clears the infrastructure bar. Fonoa has certified, shipped Peppol capability — real signal, from a company most of the market still files under “API tax automation.” VATCalc’s signal is real but different in kind: independent analytical credibility rather than proven UK deployment — we found no UK-specific certification or reference case to match Fonoa’s, so treat its commentary as a reason to watch the firm, not yet a reason to shortlist it on infrastructure.

ERP and Accounting Platforms

The SME tier is talking. Xero has genuine first-mover bragging rights — live UK eInvoicing since 2023, Peppol receiving already switched on. Sage has a dedicated UK page, though Sage 50 and Sage 200 have zero native Peppol support and lean entirely on third-party bolt-ons. QuickBooks/Intuit took the buy-not-build route outright, wiring in Sovos.

The enterprise tier is silent. SAP’s Document and Reporting Compliance covers six European countries — not the UK; the only UK-specific SAP content anywhere is a UKISUG user-group event, not SAP itself talking. Microsoft’s Business Central documentation lists native Peppol support for six countries — not the UK — leaving the UK conversation to ISV partner Continia. Oracle/NetSuite offers generic Peppol capability and no UK statement at all.

Signal: real, and the sharpest finding in this piece. The SME platforms — a fraction of the market cap of the ERP giants — are the ones actually talking to UK customers by name. If you’re running SAP, Dynamics or NetSuite, stop waiting for your platform vendor to lead here; nobody at those three has said a word about the UK specifically.

Big 4 and Accounting Firms

KPMG has the most developed UK content, pairing its Budget 2025 analysis with HMRC’s own SME-awareness data. EY flagged the original consultation with a specific alert. Deloitte has a standalone blog making the early-preparation case. PwC: nothing UK-specific found.

Signal: KPMG is the one genuine value-add in this cohort — primary data, not restated policy. PwC’s silence, given its UK tax-advisory footprint, is loud enough to flag to clients assuming blanket Big 4 coverage of this topic.

Associations: ICAEW, CIOT, ATT

All three filed real consultation responses, and together they’re the only cohort here arguing for smaller or slower. ICAEW wanted voluntary-first, mandation held to 2030 at the earliest — overruled on timing. CIOT wants one flexible UK standard and phasing by size. ATT went furthest with actual numbers: a VAT-threshold exemption, a de minimis carve-out for low-volume B2B/B2G trade.

Signal: ATT’s is the most legislatable position on the table — specific thresholds a policymaker could act on. ICAEW’s is the most fully worked through, even though government didn’t take it.

HMRC Itself

Twelve weeks of consultation, a considered no to the voluntary-first path ICAEW and ATT pushed for, and a decentralised four-corner model chosen partly to dodge the clearance friction that’s caused real pain elsewhere in Europe. Budget 2026 carries the real weight: syntaxes, phasing, enforcement, legacy EDI.

Signal: HMRC’s own awareness gap — 40% unaware, 90%+ never contacted — is the one problem on this list HMRC hasn’t visibly fixed, sitting awkwardly next to a vendor market already at full volume.

Three Moves for Sophisticated Buyers

Stop accepting certification as a proxy for readiness. “EN 16931-ready” and “Peppol-certified” are table stakes, not differentiators. Ask for a shipped UK or Ireland deployment at real volume — Thomson Reuters/Pagero’s NHS work is the bar.
If you’re on SAP, Dynamics 365 or NetSuite, run your access-point selection now — independently of your ERP roadmap. None of the three has a first-party UK commitment. Connectivity today comes from bolted-on partners. Waiting for native support risks missing the 2027–28 pilot window entirely.
Contract against the Budget 2026 spec, not today’s generic pitch. Lock vendors into delivering PINT UK/Peppol BIS Billing 3.0 support within 90–120 days of publication, with access-point pricing defined now — platform fee, per-document, per-connection. Negotiate that clause today. Don’t renegotiate it from weakness in 2028.

Sources:

Now staying in the UK we’ll take a look at home-grown SMB VAT challenger LOVAT

111 Countries, Forty People: The Arithmetic Behind Lovat’s Reviews

Every e-commerce seller eventually hits the same wall: VAT registration somewhere they barely sell, an EPR obligation they didn’t know existed, a DAC7 form with a deadline attached. Lovat has built a genuinely clever, cheap answer to that wall — and a ~40-person team is now the whole reason to read the fine print before you rely on it.

WHAT IT ACTUALLY IS

Lovat is an Edinburgh-built VAT/GST and US sales-tax platform for cross-border e-commerce sellers and marketplace operators: real-time Calculation and Reporting across 111 countries and all 50 US states, wrapped in Managed Services (registration, Responsible Person/fiscal representation, EPR, DAC7 marketplace reporting). Integration is entirely e-commerce-native — Amazon, Shopify, eBay, Etsy, WooCommerce, Magento, AliExpress, Stripe, PayPal, Xero, plus a REST API — with no SAP, Oracle, or Dynamics connector anywhere. Center of gravity: small-business, marketplace-first, price-led, not enterprise.

Scale: ~40–42 employees serving 3,000+ customers across 47 countries, on an estimated ~$3.0–4.0M ARR (no disclosed revenue). Longlist material for solo and small-team digital sellers — not for anyone running tax through an ERP.

WHERE IT BEATS THE MARKET BASELINE

Against the indirect tax tech baseline, Lovat wins on breadth-per-dollar and onboarding friction, not depth. Its free nexus/threshold-monitoring tier is a smart acquisition wedge most vendors gate behind a paid plan. EPR is a first-class, actively marketed line — a sharp bet given how many sellers are newly exposed to packaging/WEEE/battery rules — and DAC7 shipped ahead of the compliance deadline, not behind it. Below baseline: no SAF-T or Intrastat at all, “30+ country” e-invoicing that’s a listing claim rather than audited depth, and a pricing-transparency complaint that recurs across reviews.

PORTFOLIO ANALYSIS

No M&A story here, and that’s the point: Lovat grew its line-up (EPR, DAC7, e-invoicing) organically, riding regulatory scope-creep among its base rather than buying geography or credibility. Calculation and Reporting are the estimated revenue core (~60% combined); Managed Services adds ~25% and is growing — and it’s that services layer, not the software, where operational strain shows up. Read this as a tight, single-codebase small-business product, not a platform assembled from acquisitions — which also means it was never built to absorb enterprise-scale complexity.

BUSINESS MODEL AND SIZE BAND FIT

Business model fit:

● B2B goods — 2, Good fit (Small/Medium), 0, Poor fit (Large): covers standard flows, but no landed-cost or duties handling for complex chains.
● B2C goods — 3, Strong fit (Small/Medium), 1, Patchy (Large): the core use case, built around marketplace-native integration.
● B2B/B2C digital services — 3, Strong fit (Small): OSS/IOSS and digital-services classification are embedded and it shows.
● B2B/B2C services (non-digital) — 1, Patchy fit throughout: registration/Responsible Person help, but little is purpose-built here.

Size band fit:

● Small — 3, Strong fit: entry pricing from ~€27–40/month, a free tier, self-serve setup reviewers clock at about a month.
● Medium — 2, Good fit: works, but pricing-transparency and manual-upload friction bite as complexity grows.
● Large — 0, Poor fit: no ERP integration, no disclosed security certification, no SI ecosystem — structural, not a matter of degree.

CUSTOMER AND EMPLOYEE SENTIMENT

Sentiment is strikingly consistent across every platform that has one: strong on rating and ease of use, with pricing transparency the one dimension that reliably drags scores down.

● G2: 4.9/5 (138 reviews) — automation and filing accuracy praised; interface complexity is the recurring gripe.
● Capterra/GetApp: ~4.7 (17 reviews) — dashboard/threshold tracking and support reviewers call out by name.
● Trustpilot: 4.2/5 (35 reviews), sharply bimodal — 86% five-star, but an 11% one-star tail on multi-month registration delays and pricing mismatches.
● Glassdoor/RepVue/Indeed: no usable data (the one Glassdoor “Lovat” listing is an unrelated company). LinkedIn shows ~41–42 employees, hiring concentrated in support/tax-ops.

Operator read: a ~40-person team supporting 3,000+ customers across 111 countries is thin bench depth by simple arithmetic — and the Trustpilot outliers look exactly like that strain showing through.

IF YOU’RE X, DO Y

If you’re a small e-commerce seller on Amazon, Shopify, eBay, Etsy, or WooCommerce needing EU/UK VAT registration, OSS/IOSS, and threshold monitoring in one cheap dashboard — shortlist by default. Same answer if you’re a marketplace operator needing DAC7 bundled with core VAT. If you’re Medium-size and multi-country, it still works, but get registration turnaround and total pricing in writing first. If you’re Large or multinational and expect ERP-grade determination, a security certification, or a formal SLA — don’t shortlist this one; no packaging of the current product solves those gaps.

For prospective employees:

● Support and domain specialists likely thrive here — it’s doing real, visible work per reviewer testimony.
● No usable Glassdoor/RepVue/Indeed signal on culture or leadership — a genuine blind spot, not a clean bill of health.
● At ~40 people covering 111 countries, expect broad generalist scope over narrow specialisation.

Want the full 27 page analyst report?

A selection of of opportunities to connect in person and interact online over the next few weeks

JULY 2026

NAEA Tax Summit 2026 (Conference) | National Association of Enrolled Agents | 27–29 July 2026 | New Orleans Marriott, New Orleans, LA

Event Page →

Prompt Engineering for Tax Teams: Hands-On AI Lab (Virtual Workshop) | TEI — Tax Executives Institute | 29 July 2026 | Virtual

A hands-on session for in-house tax professionals on applying prompt engineering techniques directly to tax workflows — practical AI skills rather than theory.

AUGUST 2026

FTA Technology Conference and Expo 2026 (Conference) | Federation of Tax Administrators | 2–5 August 2026 | St. Louis Union Station, St. Louis, MO

Event Page →

US International Tax Course 2026 (Course) | TEI — Tax Executives Institute | 3–7 August 2026 | Seattle, WA

*any organisers or events I’ve missed? please let me know.

A curated selection of blogs, white-papers and on demand content published by multiple organisartions across the landscape, organised into a themed learning path.

MONTH TWO · JULY 2026

E-Invoicing, CTC & the Live Mandate Landscape

Week 1 · 6–10 July

The Global CTC Landscape: What 80+ Live Mandates Actually Look Like

📖Continuous Transaction Controls: The Future of Compliance Sovos 12–15 min

📖Streamline the Future #6: Reporting Built for Global E-Invoicing Operations Comarch 8–10 min

📖2025 in Review: 5 Trends That Defined the Indirect Tax Industry Innovate Tax 8–10 min

Week total: 3 articles · ~28–35 min

Week 2 · 13–17 July

ViDA, Belgium & the European Mandate Wave

📖 What is ViDA? VAT in the Digital Age Initiative Q&A Pagero (Thomson Reuters) 12–15 min

📖5 Things We Can Learn from Belgium’s 2026 E-Invoicing Mandate Innovate Tax 8–10 min

🎥E-Invoicing Trends and Obligations: 2026 and Beyond (feat. Forrester) Comarch / Forrester 60 min

Week total: 2 articles + 1 webinar · ~80–85 min

Week 3 · 20–24 July

Emerging Markets & Platform Architecture: Brazil, Norway & Building for Scale

📖Brazil 2026 Tax Reform: Key E-Invoicing Changes Fonoa 10–12 min

📖E-Invoicing in Norway and Latest European VAT Updates Marosa VAT 8–10 min

📖Leading the Charge: E-Invoicing as the Cornerstone of Future Compliance Vertex Inc. 10–12 min

Week total: 3 articles · ~28–34 min

Week 4 · 27–31 July

The Buyer’s Market: Evaluating VAT & E-Invoicing Tools Across the Vendor Spectrum

📖8 Best Cross-Border VAT Compliance Software: 2026 Guide Kintsugi 12–15 min

🎥VAT Snapshot: From Poland to the UAE — Preparing for 2026 Mandates Sovos 45–60 min

🎥Embracing the Future of Tax Compliance with AI Avalara 45–60 min

Week total: 1 article + 2 webinars · ~102–135 min

Month Two total: 9 articles + 3 webinars · ~238–289 min

*any cool content I’ve missed? please let me know.

A selection of open roles across tax tech vendors and tax advisory/consulting businesses who are involved in tax technology.

Use the column headers to sort, or the search function and don’t forget to navigate all pages!

*I do this using an AI agent and due to the volume, I don’t check every link, so please let me know if any of these don’t work or have disappeared when you follow them.

✌ Last thoughts

The Nexus Issue 13: Quaderno

Nexus Tax Technology — Fri, 03 Jul 2026 07:30:48 GMT

This week in Taxtech

Things have been pretty quiet for me this week on the news front as I’ve been head down recreating some of the vendor profile graphics and upgrading the analyst reports, although I was excited to hear about Taxwire’s Series A funding of $25M, which comes very quickly off the back of their pre-seed and seed raises,

I spoke with their founder Andrew Rea a couple weeks ago and I can tell you he’s one smart guy and that team is moving like lightning, maybe more on that / from him later if I’m lucky!

This also got me thinking about funding velocity, which IMO is increasing and this as a proxy for market growth, so I took a basic look at the US Sales and Use tax challenger market with the help of Claude. It would seem to correlate with slowing growth amongst the larger players that we saw in a previous issue

I’ll definitely be drilling into this a bit further when we come round to looking at that group more closely but in the meantime here’s a snapshot of some of the main players and their funding history/velocity.

If nothing else it tells us that that segment of the market is hot right now and there are increasingly good options for buyers and career pathing.

Now enjoy the issue where we’ll take a look at European SMB VAT challenger Quaderno.

The Tax Sidekick Visma Bought, Not Built

Quaderno didn’t get acquired because it was broken. It got acquired because a 13-person team in the Canary Islands had quietly built the cleanest self-serve VAT engine for digital sellers in the market — and a €2.8bn Norwegian software group wanted in. The question now: does Visma’s money turn this into something bigger, or just a nicer-funded version of the same small thing?

What Quaderno actually is

Quaderno is a self-serve tax compliance platform for digital sellers: VAT/GST/sales tax calculation, OSS/IOSS handling, compliant invoicing, threshold monitoring, and — newly — Peppol e-invoicing. Its centre of gravity is Stripe and Shopify, not SAP. Coverage runs deep on digital services tax across 100+ countries and all 50 US states, and shallow everywhere else: no ERP connectors, no CTC clearance models, no SAF-T. At roughly 13–17 people and an estimated ~$3.6M ARR, this is a micro-team punching well above its size on customer experience. The buyers who belong here are SaaS founders, e-learning platforms, and Stripe-native digital sellers — not finance teams managing ERP.

Where it beats the baseline

Against the market’s table stakes — accuracy, jurisdiction coverage, integration depth, support — Quaderno clears the bar on exactly the dimensions that matter to its segment and ignores the rest deliberately. Integration depth into payment processors and e-commerce platforms (Stripe, Shopify, WooCommerce, Kajabi, Teachable) is genuinely strong, and it’s the only tax compliance tool in its class with a native Zapier integration. Customer support is the standout: response times in hours, reviewers loyal since 2017. Where it sits below baseline is breadth — no SAP/Oracle/Dynamics, no SI ecosystem, and pricing that quietly punishes high-volume micro-transaction sellers.

Portfolio read

This is not a portfolio built through acquisition — Quaderno has made zero acquisitions; it is the acquisition. The product evolved in a straight line: VAT lookup → US sales tax → API platform → managed filing → Peppol. Visma’s September 2023 deal is the one structural break in that history, and it shows up in exactly one place so far: a Belgium-only Peppol e-invoicing launch in January 2026, timed neatly to Belgium’s own B2B mandate. That’s a sensible first move, not a transformation. The real tell will be whether Visma lets Quaderno integrate with Holded (its Spanish SMB accounting sibling) or keeps the Spanish portfolio siloed.

Fit scores

B2B/B2C digital services: 3 – Strong fit. Built for this exact use case — OSS, IOSS, OIDAR, reverse charge, all present.
B2C goods: 2 – Good fit. OSS/IOSS works for small physical sellers; no multi-warehouse logic.
B2B goods: 1 – Patchy fit. No supply-chain or customs logic.
B2B/B2C services (non-digital): 1 – Patchy fit. Basic invoicing only.
Small: 3 – Strong fit. Sub-hour setup, sub-$150/month, this is the home turf.
Medium: 2 – Good fit. Works, but governance gaps (no approval chains, no exemption workflow) start to show.
Large: 0 – Poor fit. No ERP, no SLA, no partner ecosystem. Don’t shortlist.

Segment archetype fit

Digital businesses (SaaS, e-learning): 3 – Strong fit. This is the core ICP, and it shows — best-in-class value at sub-$150/month.
Cross-border e-commerce: 2 – Good fit. OSS/IOSS and Shopify-native handling work well; physical goods complexity is out of scope.
Marketplace sellers: 2 – Good fit. Quaderno Connect’s API embed opens this up, but evidence of major marketplace customers at scale is thin.
Accounting / tax service-led clients: 2 – Good fit. The accountant portal makes it a workable handoff tool, not a practice management platform.
Hybrid managed-service buyers: 2 – Good fit. Self-serve plus managed OSS/US filing is a real combination, just geographically shallow beyond those two regimes.
Multinational enterprise finance teams: 0 – Poor fit. No ERP, no SI ecosystem, no CTC. Structural non-starter.

Delivery model fit

Software-only: 3 – Strong fit. The native model — fast self-serve, plug-and-play with Stripe/Shopify.
Marketplace / self-serve: 3 – Strong fit. Sub-hour implementation and a 7-day free trial remove all the friction that matters at this segment.
Software + managed services: 2 – Good fit. The managed OSS/US filing add-on is genuinely useful, but its full geographic reach isn’t well documented.
White-label / OEM: 2 – Good fit. Quaderno Connect enables embedded tax for platforms — a real but underproven product.
Managed services-led: 1 – Patchy fit. Filing exists as an add-on, not a full BPO delivery model. Don’t expect this to replace a compliance outsourcing relationship.

Customer and employee signal

Customer sentiment is consistently strong everywhere it’s visible — G2 and Capterra both land around 4.3, Trustpilot’s 59 reviews skew heavily positive, and the dominant theme across every platform is the same: setup is fast and support actually answers. The one recurring gripe is pricing at high-volume, low-value transaction counts — a direct symptom of the per-transaction model. On the employee side, there’s almost nothing to read: no Glassdoor, no RepVue, team too small to register. What we can infer is more telling than what’s missing — founder Carlos Hernández Medina stayed on as MD post-acquisition, and that kind of retention usually means the culture wasn’t broken enough to need fixing.

If you’re buying…

If you’re a SaaS founder or digital seller on Stripe or Shopify doing under ~€50M with a lean finance team, put this on the shortlist without much agonising — it’s hard to beat on value and setup speed. If you’re an e-commerce business with real IOSS exposure, use it for calculation but line up a separate intermediary for the filing obligation; Quaderno isn’t one. If your tax footprint touches SAP, CTC mandates, or anything ERP-shaped, this is a non-starter — don’t waste a procurement cycle on it. Watch the Peppol rollout pace over the next 18 months: Belgium is the easy one, and France or Germany will tell you whether Visma is actually investing or just maintaining.

For prospective employees: strong move if you want founder-adjacent ownership and a customer-obsessed culture inside a stable, well-capitalised parent — Visma’s retain-and-fund model is genuinely low-drama by PE standards. Less appealing if you’re chasing fast career scaling: a 15-person team isn’t building a leadership ladder anytime soon, and the Canary Islands location limits the senior tax-domain talent pool you’ll be working alongside. No RepVue or Glassdoor data exists to sanity-check sales-org health, so if you’re interviewing for a commercial role, ask directly about quota structure and territory design rather than assuming.

Want the full 27 page analyst report?

A selection of of opportunities to connect in person and interact online over the next few weeks

July 2026

Global Withholding Tax Summit 2026 (In-Person)

Withholding Tax Summit | July 1, 2026 | London, UK Conference dedicated to withholding tax and cross-border compliance challenges, with emphasis on regulatory change and digitalisation.

Event Page → https://withholdingtaxsummit.com/

August 2026

US International Tax Course 2026 (Course)

TEI — Tax Executives Institute | 3–7 August 2026 | Seattle, WA, TEI’s intensive week-long course for in-house tax professionals covering the full spectrum of US international tax — from Subpart F and GILTI through FDII, BEAT, and transfer pricing — with substantial CPE credit available.

*any organisers or events I’ve missed? please let me know.

A curated selection of blogs, white-papers and on demand content published by multiple organisartions across the landscape, organised into a themed learning path.

MONTH TWO · JULY 2026

E-Invoicing, CTC & the Live Mandate Landscape

Week 5 · 6–10 July

The Global CTC Landscape: What 80+ Live Mandates Actually Look Like

📖Continuous Transaction Controls: The Future of Compliance Sovos 12–15 min

📖Streamline the Future #6: Reporting Built for Global E-Invoicing Operations Comarch 8–10 min

📖2025 in Review: 5 Trends That Defined the Indirect Tax Industry Innovate Tax 8–10 min

Week total: 3 articles · ~28–35 min

Week 6 · 13–17 July

ViDA, Belgium & the European Mandate Wave

📖 What is ViDA? VAT in the Digital Age Initiative Q&A Pagero (Thomson Reuters) 12–15 min

📖5 Things We Can Learn from Belgium’s 2026 E-Invoicing Mandate Innovate Tax 8–10 min

🎥E-Invoicing Trends and Obligations: 2026 and Beyond (feat. Forrester) Comarch / Forrester 60 min

Week total: 2 articles + 1 webinar · ~80–85 min

Week 7 · 20–24 July

Emerging Markets & Platform Architecture: Brazil, Norway & Building for Scale

📖Brazil 2026 Tax Reform: Key E-Invoicing Changes Fonoa 10–12 min

📖E-Invoicing in Norway and Latest European VAT Updates Marosa VAT 8–10 min

📖Leading the Charge: E-Invoicing as the Cornerstone of Future Compliance Vertex Inc. 10–12 min

Week total: 3 articles · ~28–34 min

Week 8 · 27–31 July

The Buyer’s Market: Evaluating VAT & E-Invoicing Tools Across the Vendor Spectrum

📖8 Best Cross-Border VAT Compliance Software: 2026 Guide Kintsugi 12–15 min

🎥VAT Snapshot: From Poland to the UAE — Preparing for 2026 Mandates Sovos 45–60 min

🎥Embracing the Future of Tax Compliance with AI Avalara 45–60 min

Week total: 1 article + 2 webinars · ~102–135 min

Month Two total: 9 articles + 3 webinars · ~238–289 min

*any cool content I’ve missed? please let me know.

A selection of open roles across tax tech vendors and tax advisory/consulting businesses who are involved in tax technology.

Use the column headers to sort, or the search function and don’t forget to navigate all pages!

*I do this using an AI agent and due to the volume, I don’t check every link, so please let me know if any of these don’t work or have disappeared when you follow them.

✌ Last thoughts

Nexus Tax Tech Issue 12: Taxually

Nexus Tax Technology — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 07:02:07 GMT

This week in Taxtech

OK so it wasn’t this week but Billentis published their 2026 report on 8th June and at a whopping 147 pages, it’s a bit of a brick and takes a while to get through. Incase you missed it or don’t have the time to read it all (who does? me it seems!), I sifted the good stuff out for you.

Riding the Tornado: What the 2026 Billentis Report Really Says

1. The market is bigger, earlier, and more uneven than most boards think

If you work in indirect tax or taxtech, the Billentis 2026 report is a reminder that we’re still early in the game, even if your inbox feels like “CTC all the way down.” The model puts global B2B invoice volume at roughly 300 billion documents a year in 2026, with only about 87–88 billion of those exchanged electronically – an electronic penetration of just 29%. In other words: seven out of ten B2B invoices worldwide are still analog or semi‑digital, even as governments push toward real‑time controls.

On a mandate‑only forecast, electronic B2B volumes grow from 88.3 billion in 2026 to 107.0 billion by 2030, about a 21% uplift that doesn’t assume any new laws beyond what’s already on the books. The regional split is where it gets interesting. Europe and Latin America are the efficiency and control labs: Europe goes from 17.2 to 26.3 billion e‑B2B invoices (+53%), and LatAm from 18.6 to 25.5 billion (+37%) by 2030 under Billentis’ conservative scenario. Asia, by contrast, is the sleeping giant – 189.4 billion B2B invoices in 2026 but only 31.3 billion electronic (17% penetration), creeping to 32.5 billion by 2030 (+4%). North America barely moves, from 10.2 to 10.4 billion, because adoption remains more business‑led than mandate‑driven.

2. Fragmented vendors, consolidating rails

The structural picture is messy. In Europe alone, around 1,000 service providers are operational, handling significantly more than half of all B2B/B2G e‑invoice transactions, and that intermediary share has been growing faster than direct point‑to‑point exchange for at least five years. On the customer side, large multinationals commonly juggle 3–20 providers just for inbound e‑invoicing, and 20–160 different portals and platforms for outbound flows and tax/reporting obligations. The market is fragmented in logos, but de‑facto consolidating around a smaller set of networks, access‑points, and “backbone” platforms that sit on top of multiple CTC and exchange models.

3. What’s signal, what’s noise in a 147‑page PDF

The real signal in this year’s report is the reframing: e‑invoicing is now positioned as the foundational layer of Integrated Digital Trade – the data spine that connects tax, finance, procurement, logistics, and payments. Governments use CTC and digital reporting to close 20–30% VAT gaps; enterprises use the same rails to automate P2P and O2C. Everything else – specific file formats, local models, sponsor profiles – is execution detail and, frankly, noise.

Second signal: fragmentation is not a bug, it’s the current market design. Multiple CTC archetypes (clearance, real‑time reporting, centralised exchange, decentralised five‑corner) and several private exchange models co‑exist and will continue to do so. Waiting for “the standard” is a career‑limiting move. Third signal: AI is treated sensibly – as an accelerant on top of structured data, not a magic trick, with data quality, legacy ERP sprawl, and accountability called out as the real brakes.

4. Three moves for tax professionals

1) Turn mandates into a quantitative risk‑and‑value map
Don’t just track “where mandates are coming”; quantify where they actually matter for your business.
Build a simple heatmap: start with two inputs—your invoice volumes by region and your revenue mix by region. Plot them on a grid that shows: high/low mandate intensity on one axis; high/low business exposure on the other.
Rank regions on two axes: for each region, score (a) how aggressive the regulatory pipeline is over the next 3–5 years (CTC, e‑reporting, SAF‑T, etc.), and (b) what share of your global invoices and revenue sits there. This gives you four boxes: “regulatory hot + high volume,” “regulatory hot + low volume,” “quiet + high volume,” “quiet + low volume.”
Tie this to budget and phasing: use that ranking to decide where you centralise first, where you accept “good enough local” for now, and where you only fund minimal controls because the combination of mandates and volume is low.
Outcome: your C‑suite sees a simple picture—“if we get Europe and LatAm wrong, we get audited; if we get Asia wrong, we drown in volume”—instead of drowning in a 40‑page mandate tracker.
2) Own the architecture conversation with a concrete consolidation plan
Most multinationals are quietly running a zoo of providers: multiple e‑invoicing and CTC vendors, dozens of portals, and a long tail of local tools. Use that as your burning‑platform story, then show a path out.
Baseline the sprawl: run a quick inventory of everything involved in issuing, receiving, reporting or archiving invoices—CTC gateways, AP/AR portals, local e‑invoicing tools, tax‑reporting uploads, custom scripts. Map which countries and processes each one touches.
Define an end‑state pattern: design a target architecture with a small number of “rails”: one or two global networks/backbones, a handful of certified service providers in markets that require it, and clear rules for when a local point solution is allowed. Make it explicit which flows must go through the backbone (e.g. all cross‑border, all CTC countries, all B2G).
Agree a decommission list and timeline: for each region, choose 3–5 portals or tools you will retire as you onboard to the new rails. Tie those retirements to specific project milestones—“when we switch Poland to the backbone, we shut down these three portals.”
Outcome: tax stops being “the team that reads legislation” and becomes co‑owner of a tangible simplification agenda—fewer vendors, fewer interfaces, fewer surprises when mandates change.
3) Make AI part of your control framework, starting with one or two concrete pilots
Treat AI as a control‑room workhorse, not a shiny front end. The best early wins come from embedding AI in the parts of the invoice and reporting lifecycle where you already bleed time and headcount.
Pick two boring, high‑impact use cases: for example, (1) automated three‑way match and anomaly detection on high‑volume AP, and (2) continuous validation of VAT fields and tax treatments in one or two CTC countries. Avoid “cute” generative use cases; go straight for error‑prone, repetitive work.
Fix the data first: run a short “data boot camp” before you let any model loose. Clean up supplier master data (VAT IDs, tax codes, bank details), harmonise invoice schemas, and standardise reason codes for exceptions. Make data quality KPIs part of the pilot.
Define control metrics upfront: set clear targets for reductions in manual touches per invoice, exception rates, post‑filing adjustments, and audit findings. Track close times and on‑time filing as headline metrics. Use those numbers to show the board: “AI reduced exceptions by X%, cut manual review time by Y%, and shortened the close by Z days.”
Outcome: AI is positioned as a way to harden your second line of defence—continuous controls and audit‑ready history—rather than as a nebulous innovation project that dies after the first demo.

I’d love to get into more conversations with anyone this, so if you have a view, please let me know or weigh in on the Linkedin Post

Now on to this week’s vendor spotlight on taxually.

Taxually: The E-Commerce Compliance Platform That’s Quietly Going Enterprise

Most enterprise tax teams haven’t shortlisted Taxually. Some of them should have. The platform handles EU VAT, OSS/IOSS, US sales & use tax, and environmental compliance in a single stack, at pricing that undercuts legacy alternatives, with native integrations into Amazon, Shopify, eBay, and Stripe. The product has outgrown its e-commerce origin story. The brand hasn’t caught up yet — and that gap is where the opportunity lies for buyers willing to look past the homepage.

WHAT TAXUALLY ACTUALLY IS

Taxually is a PE-backed indirect tax compliance platform built around four marketed products: CrossTax (EU VAT registration and filing in 45+ countries, OSS/IOSS), LumaTax (US sales & use tax across all 50 states, acquired April 2023), EcoTax (EPR and environmental compliance for UK and EU), and OneTax (consolidated cross-border VAT payment and FX). Its centre of gravity is compliance workflow — registration, data extraction, validation, filing, remittance — not real-time tax determination or e-invoicing. Data flows in automatically from Amazon, eBay, Shopify, and Stripe (where Taxually is a named filing partner), removing the manual extraction step that defines most legacy compliance operations. Estimated headcount sits at approximately 172, with PE backing from Ardian Growth (April 2022) and a subsequent growth equity round; revenue is directionally in the £8–14M ARR range (analyst estimate; not disclosed). The natural shortlist profile: cross-border e-commerce and marketplace sellers, accounting firms wanting a white-label compliance platform, and mid-market businesses managing multi-jurisdictional VAT and SUT with lean internal tax functions.

WHERE IT BEATS THE MARKET BASELINE

Three structural advantages sit clearly above the indirect tax market baseline. First, EU VAT and US SUT in a single platform at competitive pricing is rare in the challenger market: most peers handle one geography or one regime, not both simultaneously. CrossTax’s 250-rule validation engine and LumaTax’s Compliance Score™ give tax teams automation depth that manual-process alternatives can’t match at the price point. Second, the e-commerce integration stack is genuinely deep: native Amazon, eBay, Shopify, and Stripe data feeds remove the most painful step in compliance workflow, and 327 Trustpilot reviews specifically validate the data import experience. Third, EcoTax (EPR/GPSR) is a niche differentiator with no close equivalent — increasingly material for EU and UK online sellers as EPR enforcement expands. Where Taxually is at or below baseline: no real-time determination API, no e-invoicing or CTC capability (a widening gap as ViDA accelerates), no SAP integration, and a brand presence that significantly underrepresents the product’s enterprise capability.

PORTFOLIO ANALYSIS

The four-product portfolio has been assembled deliberately over six years: CrossTax as the original core, LumaTax via acquisition in 2023 to add US coverage, EcoTax rebranded from Greenifi for environmental obligations, and OneTax launched in 2024 for payment consolidation. CrossTax and managed services (fiscal representation, notice management, filing) are estimated to account for roughly 60–65% of revenue combined, with LumaTax adding a further 15–20%. The portfolio is directionally coherent — all four products serve the same buyer — but integration is still in progress: LumaTax and CrossTax operate as separate environments today, which limits the single-stack global story in live procurement conversations. OneTax is real but nascent; its revenue contribution is minimal. The practical operator read: you get genuine multi-product breadth, but you buy it as a staged journey. Plan for a combined platform in 12–18 months, not day one.

SEGMENT, DELIVERY MODEL, AND SIZE BAND FITS

Business model fit

• B2C goods: 3 – Strong fit core ICP; Amazon/Shopify/eBay native, OSS/IOSS, EU VAT + US SUT combined. Strongest product-market alignment in the portfolio.
• B2B goods: 2 – Good fit multi-country VAT filing and nexus management well supported; no SAP integration or CTC for complex supply chains.
• B2B/B2C digital services: 2 – Good fit Stripe filing partnership provides OSS/IOSS and ESS coverage at scale; no real-time determination API for checkout-time tax.
• B2B/B2C services (non-digital): 1 – Patchy fit limited specialist content; no non-goods workflow tools or vertical-specific coverage.

Size band fit

• Small: 2 – Good fit competitive pricing confirmed across 327 Trustpilot reviews; self-serve via Amazon/Shopify native; low onboarding friction for e-commerce scope.
• Medium: 2 – Good fit NetSuite and Dynamics connectors enable mid-market ERP deployment; four-product scope suits lean tax teams with wide geographic obligations.
• Large: 1 – Patchy fit no SAP, no e-invoicing/CTC, no SI partner ecosystem, no published SLAs; enterprise ceiling not yet credible for complex large-scale procurement.

CUSTOMER AND EMPLOYEE SENTIMENTS

Customer review coverage is concentrated on Trustpilot. There are no G2, Capterra, Gartner Peer Insights, or TrustRadius profiles — a significant gap for enterprise buyers who start diligence on structured review platforms and will not find Taxually there. The Trustpilot signal is clear: 327 reviews validate the e-commerce product experience convincingly. Employee signals are mixed at a small sample size.

• Trustpilot (327 reviews, 4.5+/5 est.) pricing, ease of data import, and support responsiveness are the dominant positive themes. Isolated delays on complex registrations (e.g. German VAT timing) are the only consistent criticism.
• G2 / Gartner Peer Insights / Capterra / TrustRadius no profile found as of June 2026. Enterprise buyers must rely on vendor-supplied references rather than independent platform reviews.
• Glassdoor (3.6/5, 15 reviews) remote-first culture and salary competitiveness praised; management friction and contractor-only structure for some non-Hungarian roles flagged.
• RepVue no profile found. Sales organisation health is not independently verifiable from public data; probe quota attainment and sales leadership directly in any hiring conversation.

The operator implication: for e-commerce buyers, Trustpilot provides real confidence. For enterprise buyers, the absence of structured platform reviews means your diligence depends entirely on reference quality — so push hard for references at comparable scope and complexity to your own.

IF YOU’RE BUILDING OR BUYING INDIRECT TAX CAPABILITY — HERE’S THE READ

For buyers

If you’re a cross-border e-commerce or marketplace seller managing EU VAT, OSS/IOSS, US multi-state SUT, and EPR obligations simultaneously, Taxually belongs at the top of your shortlist — the combination of native e-commerce integrations, OSS/IOSS automation, US SUT via LumaTax, and EcoTax for EPR is hard to match at comparable pricing. If you’re an accounting or tax firm looking to white-label a compliance platform for your clients, the CrossTax and LumaTax white-label motion is commercially well developed and worth a structured conversation. If you’re a mid-market multinational with a lean tax team, wide geographic footprint, and no SAP dependency or e-invoicing obligation, Taxually is a credible shortlist candidate — but validate LumaTax integration status, OneTax maturity, and SLA framework before signing. If your scope includes SAP, e-invoicing or CTC compliance (Italy, France, Poland, ViDA), or large-enterprise SI delivery, Taxually does not answer those requirements today and will not by year-end on current public evidence. Know what you’re buying: a compliance workflow platform with genuine multi-regime breadth, not a tax engine.

For prospective employees

• Strong move for indirect tax professionals ex-KPMG founding leadership and domain-deep content team make this a credible place to build EU VAT, US SUT, and EPR expertise across real client complexity.
• Attractive for enterprise sales professionals who thrive in growth-stage environments structured, process-driven team with a clear enterprise ICP. Brand awareness is still building, so outbound effort is above average until inbound demand gen catches up.
• Mixed for non-Budapest staff Glassdoor signals a contractor-only model for some roles outside Hungary; confirm employment structure, benefits, and equity participation before accepting.
• PE-backed pace is real two investors on the cap table and approaching the back half of a typical hold window means exit planning will shape the agenda over the next 24 months. Upside is real; so is restructuring risk.
• No RepVue data sales org health cannot be independently calibrated from public sources. Ask direct questions about quota attainment history, territory design, and sales leadership tenure in interviews.

Want the full 26 page analyst report?

A selection of of opportunities to connect in person and interact online over the next few weeks

July 2026

Global Withholding Tax Summit 2026 (In-Person)

Withholding Tax Summit | July 1, 2026 | London, UK Conference dedicated to withholding tax and cross-border compliance challenges, with emphasis on regulatory change and digitalisation.

Event Page → https://withholdingtaxsummit.com/

August 2026

US International Tax Course 2026 (Course)

*any organisers or events I’ve missed? please let me know.

A curated selection of blogs, white-papers and on demand content published by multiple organisartions across the landscape, organised into a themed learning path.

MONTH ONE · JUNE 2026

Landscape, AI Strategy & the New Shape of the Tax Tech Market

This month maps the terrain: where the tax technology market is in mid-2026, how AI has moved from experimentation to deployment, what the data tells us about how tax teams are actually investing, and what differentiated strategies look like across the full spectrum from enterprise platforms to AI-native SMB tools.

Week 1 · 1–5 June

The State of the Market: What the Data Actually Says

We open with two benchmark research pieces that together paint the most accurate picture available of where corporate tax technology investment, adoption, and sentiment stands in mid-2026 — the Thomson Reuters Institute’s 2026 Corporate Tax Technology Report (built on 170 US tax decision-makers surveyed Nov–Dec 2025, in partnership with TEI) and Vertex’s Indirect Tax Trends report, which covers the regulatory and policy shifts driving the spending. KPMG’s freshly published connected modelling framework provides the advisory firm’s strategic synthesis.

01 📖 6 Insights from the 2026 Corporate Tax Technology Report Thomson Reuters Institute / TEI 10–12 min

02 📖 2026 Indirect Tax Trends Vertex Inc. 8–10 min

03 📖 The Future of Tax: Connected Modeling and an AI-Enabled Tax Function KPMG 8–10 min

Week total: 3 articles · ~26–32 min

Week 2 · 8–12 June

AI in Practice: From Bolt-On Tools to Agentic Workflows

A deliberately varied week — Wolters Kluwer on the organisational transformation challenges of AI adoption (not just the technology), Thomson Reuters on how indirect tax teams are building agility into their function, and Sphere’s independent overview of the AI tools landscape for tax professionals. Together these avoid the vendor echo chamber and give a rounded view of where AI is genuinely landing versus where it is still aspirational.

04 📖 Survive or Thrive? 2026 Will Test Tax Teams’ Limits Wolters Kluwer / CCH 6–8 min

05 📖 Indirect Tax Transformation: Navigating Change, Embracing Technology Thomson Reuters 10–12 min

07 📖 AI Tools for Tax Professionals: Automate Smarter, Not Harder Sphere 10–12 min

Week total: 3 articles · ~26–32 min

Week 3 · 15–19 June

The New Vendor Landscape: Enterprise to AI-Native, and Everything Between

This is the week where the expanded vendor universe comes into focus. Kintsugi’s 2026 SaaS guide is an unusually candid market map — covering the full spectrum from Avalara and Vertex at the enterprise end through to Anrok, Numeral, and Kintsugi itself for SMBs and SaaS companies, with honest commentary on where each fits and fails. Fonoa’s tech stack strategy piece provides the architectural counterpoint: how do you build a coherent compliance infrastructure rather than accumulating point solutions? The webinar from Wolters Kluwer closes the week with a live practitioner lens on the transformation challenge.

06📖Best Sales Tax Software for SaaS Companies: 2026 Guide Kintsugi 12–15 min

10📖Tax Tech Strategy: Integrate Technology for Compliance Fonoa 10–12 min

09🎥Beyond the Return: How AI and Automation Are Reshaping Tax Preparation Wolters Kluwer / CCH 50–60 min

Week total: 2 articles + 1 webinar · ~72–87 min

Week 4 · 22–26 June

The Strategic Lens: From Compliance Tool to Business Partner

Month One closes with two pieces that zoom out to the strategic and organisational challenge — Wolters Kluwer on the shift from compliance to advisory services, and Fonoa’s SYNAPSE 2026 practitioner takeaways on what the tax function looks like when real-time compliance is the baseline. The Vertex / Kintsugi investment announcement is included as a signal piece: what does it mean when the largest indirect tax enterprise vendor makes a strategic bet on an AI-native SMB platform?

08📖Beyond Compliance: How Tax Professionals Are Becoming Strategic Advisors Wolters Kluwer / CCH 8–10 min

11📖5 Key Indirect Tax Trends from SYNAPSE 2026 Fonoa 10–12 min

36📖Vertex Announces Strategic Investment in Kintsugi: What It Means for the Market Vertex / Kintsugi 6–8 min

Week total: 3 articles · ~24–30 min

Month One total: 9 articles + 1 webinar · ~148–181 min

*any cool content I’ve missed? please let me know.

A selection of open roles across tax tech vendors and tax advisory/consulting businesses who are involved in tax technology.

Use the column headers to sort, or the (new) search function and don’t forget to navigate all pages!

*I do this using an AI agent and due to the volume, I don’t check every link, so please let me know if any of these don’t work or have disappeared when you follow them.

✌ Last thoughts

Nexus Tax Tech Issue 11: Kintsugi Special

Nexus Tax Technology — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 06:30:50 GMT

This issue is proudly bought to you by Kintsugi

Kintsugi automates sales tax compliance for SaaS and ecommerce businesses. A data platform at its core, Kintsugi integrates seamlessly with billing, accounting, HR, and ecommerce systems to calculate taxes across borders, monitor exposure in real-time, handle registrations and filings across local, state and country jurisdictions, and manage remittance with audit-ready reporting.

Kintsugi operates across 110 countries, with fast setup, transparent pricing, 24/7 support, and a free entry point — a deliberate departure from the implementation-heavy, contract-first model that has defined this category.

Over 7,000 businesses have connected their data to Kintsugi to put sales tax on autopilot. Based in San Francisco, founded in 2022.

Main site and product overview: Kintsugi – AI‑powered sales tax automation
Customer reviews: Kintsugi Reviews, Details & Ratings on G2

Connect with Kintsugi

Get the latest on Kintsugi’s product and expansion releases, events, and partnerships, and see our take on the latest in tax tech by following us on LinkedIn
Turn on real-time exposure monitoring to uncover where your sales tax liabilities are
Calculate how much sales tax you need to charge or pay based on the item’s price and your location

🎉 First Partnership For The Nexus

Today’s issue marks a really important step in the journey for the Nexus, the first corporate collaboration. In my mind, this is an amazing thing for 2 main reasons:

It’s such a natural progression from online, uni-directional research to actual conversations, this lends colour and substance to the work I’ve been doing
I get to learn and share different and exciting perspectives on the market, from the intelligent and driven people - like Pujun Bhatnager - that are shaping it

It’s also a lot of fun!

When I think about this it was inevitable really but I’m pleased it’s happened so soon, and I can’t wait to share the first one with you, so here you go…

✌ Paul

P.S. I’m still including the usual jobs, training and event links below….
P.P.S. Interested in partnering?

The Nexus × Kintsugi: A Conversation with Pujun Bhatnagar

CEO & Co-Founder, Kintsugi

Paul Guyer: Pujun, let’s start at the beginning. You’ve got quite an unusual origin story for a tech founder. How did you end up here, and why found Kintsugi?

Pujun Bhatnagar: My relationship with tax goes back further than most. My grandfather was a chartered accountant, what we’d call a CPA in the US. My father followed the same path and was an early employee at Avalara, where he spent over thirteen years. My mom is an economist. So our dinner table conversations were essentially about how society functions, how infrastructure gets funded, and how the world raises the money to build roads, libraries, schools.

When my father started sharing the realities of what Avalara’s product was doing well — and where it was falling short — the idea started forming. I want to be clear: any business that gets customers to pay a single dollar is doing something genuinely hard. I have real respect for what Scott MacFarlane and that team built.

But the question I kept coming back to was: what if you approached indirect taxation not as a tax content problem, but as a data problem?

My entire career had been built in data, statistics, and AI. What people now call deep learning and LLMs, though I was doing that research in my freshman year. I wrote two papers, one on Intelligent Tutoring Systems, one on Collaborative Machine Learning, that were eventually acquired by Microsoft Research and became foundational to ChatGPT. After that, I spent five-plus years at Facebook, watching how the world’s biggest companies attack problems from a data-first perspective.

Then in 2018, South Dakota v. Wayfair happened. My father and I talked about what it meant: if this ruling goes in favor of South Dakota, sales tax becomes a data-intensive problem at a scale the industry has never seen before. And I could already see that the AI and research capabilities underpinning the traditional tax content engine were going to become commoditized. Fast.

So the question became: what if we built a data platform company — not a sales tax company — and used that as the foundation for compliance rails covering indirect taxation globally?

"By the time South Dakota v. Wayfair happened in 2018, it felt less like a legal event and more like a starting gun."

Paul Guyer: That framing — data platform, not tax software — comes up a lot when I look Kintsugi online. How does that manifest in practice?

Pujun Bhatnagar: It starts with setup. In just a few clicks and minutes, a business can connect their revenue and HR data and we show them their full sales tax exposure, free, no credit card required. We call it a Nexus report or study, and it updates every ten minutes to monitor their exposure in real time.

From there, the platform handles end-to-end compliance: registrations, filings, remittances, exemption certificates, tax calculation APIs, across 110 countries. Not just the content layer. The actual work.

The agents we’ve built do the heavy lifting in parallel: product classification, address validation, nexus determination, exposure analysis. Things that used to require teams of people manually working pivot tables or running spreadsheets with twenty-five million rows until their laptops overheated. We automated all of it.

My co-founder Jeff Gibson, is our CTO, and he comes from a background in quote-to-cash architecture. He helped Postly, Cloudflare, and Lacework prepare for their IPOs. When I pitched him this idea as a slide deck, he immediately saw how to build the systems layer. Together we asked: if we have the data, and we have the technical chops, what can we solve for?

Paul Guyer: One thing that stands out in your reviews and customer feedback is onboarding. Vendors in this space have made that notoriously painful.

Pujun Bhatnagar: It was a deliberate architectural choice. We built for product-led growth from day one — a true “get started” button, not just a temporary free trial offering. A customer can follow our docs, connect their data, and see live exposure analysis without speaking to a salesperson or onboarding team.

Paul Guyer: Let me push on AI for a moment. There’s a lot of signal and a lot of noise in this space right now. How do you separate out the signals?

Pujun Bhatnagar: Healthy skepticism is warranted. A lot of what gets called “AI” is rebranded statistics from a decade ago.

What I can tell you is how we think about it. Other incumbents, from what I can observe externally, have historically hired hundreds of researchers to maintain their tax content engine manually. At Kintsugi, which is less than three years old, we built a comparable capability using in-house tools and three tax researchers to start. That’s what genuine AI leverage looks like in practice.

“If we are doing things the same way we did them last quarter, we are already legacy.”

The same applies to integrations. We can ship a connector to an ERP or billing platform in under a week if we have the right permissions. I don’t see that velocity anywhere else in this market.

I also lecture at Stanford, which keeps me closely connected to what’s actually at the frontier. One thing Jeff and I challenge ourselves on constantly: if we’re doing things the same way we did last quarter, we’re already legacy. The cycle has accelerated that much.

Paul Guyer: We’ve seen a broader tension in the market lately between human capital and AI spend — Intuit recently cut around 17% of their workforce. How does that play out for customers and the people left in these organizations?

Pujun Bhatnagar: I see AI completely differently than a cost-cutting mechanism. The question Jeff and I ask is: if our R&D team was producing X amount of output before AI, we want that to be 5X, not the same X at lower cost. Give the best people the best tools, built in-house where necessary, and let them operate at a different scale entirely. That’s how you move faster than everyone else and corner the market.

For customer-facing functions, go-to-market, customer success, the calculus is different. Customers are trusting us with sensitive financial data. They expect the platform to work, and they want a human to answer when something’s unclear. We take every support theme seriously, and when a pattern emerges, we build the automation to address the root cause rather than patching it with headcount.

I took a page from Facebook’s early culture on this: if you’re doing something manually more than once, you need to automate it. That’s a genuine organizational posture, not a hiring freeze dressed up as innovation. There’s a real difference between companies that use AI to do more with great people and companies that use AI as a justification to do less for their customers.

Paul Guyer: You’re at over 7,000 customers now. That’s an extraordinary number for a three-year-old company. What do you think that says about the market?

Pujun Bhatnagar: It signals that the market was ready for a different model. The incumbents did important work. They created the market, made compliance accessible, and built real content depth. But they took a fundamentally consulting-led approach. For years, the pitch was: we have the most nuanced tax engine, we have the most researchers, we support the most product categories. That was a legitimate moat until AI commoditized the content layer.

Now customers are sophisticated enough to ask for something different: one neck to choke. They don’t want to buy a content engine from one vendor and hire a team to handle filings and remittance manually. They want a single platform doing the whole circle of compliance.

"We are building the compliance rails. We do not want the work, the client relationships, or the advisory revenue. Think of what we're doing as laying the railway tracks. What you build on top — that's yours."

We also happen to be in a period of structural market expansion. Post-Wayfair, compliance became every company’s problem, not just large enterprises. COVID accelerated that by dispersing workforces across jurisdictions. AI-first and digital-first companies are hitting nexus in multiple states almost immediately after launch. And nearly half of US states have meaningfully updated their sales tax treatment of SaaS in the last two years, with more expected in 2026 given budget pressures.

Paul Guyer: How do you think about the TAM in that context?

Pujun Bhatnagar: Differently from the traditional framing. The conventional estimate has been somewhere around $7–14 billion globally for sales tax automation. When I look at this as an indirect taxation data problem serving three constituencies–businesses, expert firms like CPAs and accounting practices, and government agencies—I see something closer to $7 trillion. Consumption tax is quietly becoming the primary revenue mechanism for local and state governments around the world. It’s the one lever that scales, that’s politically viable, and that data makes increasingly traceable and enforceable.

Paul Guyer: On the expert side with tax and accounting firms, you’ve been quite deliberate about positioning Kintsugi as complementary rather than competitive. How is that different to other vendors?

Pujun Bhatnagar: Some platforms in this space historically wanted to eventually own the customer relationship end-to-end, including consulting. That’s not us.

Think of Kintsugi as laying the railway tracks. It’s the job of the CPA firm, the accounting practice, the SALT specialist, to build the trains; the premium experiences, the nuanced advisory work, the relationship. What we give them is the infrastructure that makes all of that faster and more accurate.

There was a recent case in North Carolina where a business sued their CPA firm for failing to identify a two-million-dollar sales tax liability even though the firm had explicitly stated they didn’t cover SALT. Customer expectations are evolving fast. Experts need tools that make them look current and capable without having to rebuild their practice from scratch. That’s what we’re building for them.

And because Kintsugi can run headless, integrating silently into an accounting firm’s own systems, they can wrap it into their billable practice without the client even seeing the underlying tool.

"When Facebook moved to the former Sun Microsystems campus, they kept the Sun sign on the reverse side of the building — so employees looking out could see it as a reminder of what happens when you stop transforming."

Paul Guyer: Who owns the future of AI in tax tech?

Pujun Bhatnagar: I always go back to first principles. Whoever is genuinely asking every day whether they’re at the bleeding edge of what the best people in AI are doing.

There’s a story I love about Facebook’s move from University Avenue in Palo Alto to the old Sun Microsystems campus in Menlo Park. They kept the Sun Microsystems sign on the inside of the building so that every employee, looking outward, would see the ghost of the company that didn’t transform fast enough. That choice was intentional.

I’m not saying legacy providers disappear. There’s real work to be done across the market. But I do believe that the companies that will own this future are the ones treating innovation as an existential daily discipline, not a quarterly initiative.

Paul Guyer: What’s your prediction for how this space evolves over the next few years?

Pujun Bhatnagar: Three things. First, the content and connector layer will continue to commoditize and accelerate. We’re building integrations in weeks. That timeline will compress further.

Second, e-invoicing. Sixty-plus countries are already mandating electronic invoicing with real-time or near-real-time reporting requirements. This is happening in Europe now; it’s coming to the US. Governments want observability into every transaction, that’s the real driver. Once they have that visibility, real-time tax calculation is the next logical step.

Third, zoom out. Governments globally are under structural fiscal pressure. They can’t raise income tax without triggering mobility, remote work proved that. They can’t raise property taxes without creating a cash-poor equity-rich crisis for homeowners. Consumption tax is the remaining lever: it taxes participation in an economy, not residency. You can tax tourists, remote sellers, digital transactions. States like New York, Florida, and Massachusetts have already hired data scientists specifically to cross-reference payroll data against filing activity. This is proactive enforcement at scale. The compliance burden isn’t going to lighten, it’s going to get more precise and more automated, simultaneously.

"You can't keep raising income tax — people relocate. You can't aggressively raise property taxes — your local representatives get voted out. Consumption taxation is the linchpin. If you're participating in a society's infrastructure, you pay your share."

Paul Guyer: Last question. What’s your practical guidance for the people reading this, whether they’re running a business, working in tax, or building in this space?

Pujun Bhatnagar: For growing businesses: indirect taxation is the number one area where you take a valuation haircut at exit, and the number one unpleasant surprise during due diligence. At minimum, connect your data and understand your exposure. Then you can prioritize getting compliant relative to everything else on your plate. You can’t manage what you don’t see.

For tax professionals and CPAs: we are building the compliance rails. We have no interest in your client relationships, your advisory work, or your consulting revenue. Use our system as infrastructure. The fact that there’s still almost no SALT curriculum in CPA certification programs in 2025, post-Wayfair, is a gap waiting to be closed. The tools now exist to fill it.

Paul Guyer: Pujun thank you, I loved our conversation. The way you’ve approached this from a data platform perspective, your family background and the AI research history, it’s a unique vantage point and it shows in what you’ve built.

Pujun Bhatnagar: Thank you, Paul. Death and taxes — you can’t avoid them.

Kintsugi provides automated sales tax and VAT compliance for ecommerce and SaaS businesses globally. Learn more at trykintsugi.com.

The Nexus is a short, curated weekly briefing covering what actually matters across the tax tech ecosystem—market insights, career opportunities and professional development. Subscribe here:

Want an intro to Kintsugi?

A selection of of opportunities to connect in person and interact online over the next few weeks

Connect with Kintsugi

Latino Tax Fest - (In-Person) stop by Kintsugi’s booth (#206)

Kintsugi | June 22-25 | MGM GRAND HOTEL & CASINO - LAS VEGAS, NV

Join Kintsugi amongst others for a variety of activities including tax education, networking and growth

https://latinotaxfest.com/

F Suite AI Demo Day - (Webinar)

Kintsugi | June 23, 2026 1:00pm-3:00pm EDT | Online/Virtual

Join The F Suite for this high-energy virtual event, where you’ll get a rapid-fire look at powerful tools designed to streamline your business without the hassle of long sales calls or drawn-out research cycles.

https://fsuitedemoday623.splashthat.com/

June 2026

**ITR Indirect Tax Forum 2026 (Conference)**
**International Tax Review** | 23–24 June 2026 | Amsterdam, Netherlands
ITR’s flagship indirect tax conference bringing together senior in-house indirect tax professionals and industry experts for two days of curated discussion on VAT, e-invoicing, and digital transformation. Vertex and Fintua among sponsors.
[Register →](https://registration.crowdcomms.com/itrindtax)

Tax & Legal Tech Summit (In-Person)

KPMG | June 25, 2026 | Zurich, Switzerland Summit focused on AI, analytics, and automation transforming tax and legal functions.

Event Page → https://kpmg.com/ch/en/events/2026/06/tax-legal-tech-summit.html

Latino Tax Fest - (In-Person) stop by Kintsugi’s booth (#206)

Kintsugi | June 22-25 | MGM GRAND HOTEL & CASINO - LAS VEGAS, NV

Join Kintsugi for a session including tax education, netowrking and growth

https://latinotaxfest.com/

F Suite AI Demo Day - (Webinar)

Kintsugi | June 23, 2026 1:00pm-3:00pm EDT | Online/Virtual

https://fsuitedemoday623.splashthat.com/

**The Future of Tax Is Tech-Savvy (Webinar)**
**insightsoftware / KPMG** | 25 June 2026, 14:00 BST / 09:00 EST | Online/Virtual
Featuring KPMG’s Global Tax Transformation Leader alongside insightsoftware, this webinar examines how the corporate tax role is being redefined by technology — and how the right platform choices make the difference between keeping up and leading.
[Register →](https://insightsoftware.com/resources/the-future-of-tax-is-tech-savvy/)

July 2026

Global Withholding Tax Summit 2026 (In-Person)

Withholding Tax Summit | July 1, 2026 | London, UK Conference dedicated to withholding tax and cross-border compliance challenges, with emphasis on regulatory change and digitalisation.

Event Page → https://withholdingtaxsummit.com/

*any organisers or events I’ve missed? please let me know.

A curated selection of blogs, white-papers and on demand content published by multiple organisartions across the landscape, organised into a themed learning path.

MONTH ONE · JUNE 2026

Landscape, AI Strategy & the New Shape of the Tax Tech Market

Week 1 · 1–5 June

The State of the Market: What the Data Actually Says

01 📖 6 Insights from the 2026 Corporate Tax Technology Report Thomson Reuters Institute / TEI 10–12 min

02 📖 2026 Indirect Tax Trends Vertex Inc. 8–10 min

03 📖 The Future of Tax: Connected Modeling and an AI-Enabled Tax Function KPMG 8–10 min

Week total: 3 articles · ~26–32 min

Week 2 · 8–12 June

AI in Practice: From Bolt-On Tools to Agentic Workflows

04 📖 Survive or Thrive? 2026 Will Test Tax Teams’ Limits Wolters Kluwer / CCH 6–8 min

05 📖 Indirect Tax Transformation: Navigating Change, Embracing Technology Thomson Reuters 10–12 min

07 📖 AI Tools for Tax Professionals: Automate Smarter, Not Harder Sphere 10–12 min

Week total: 3 articles · ~26–32 min

Week 3 · 15–19 June

The New Vendor Landscape: Enterprise to AI-Native, and Everything Between

06📖Best Sales Tax Software for SaaS Companies: 2026 Guide Kintsugi 12–15 min

10📖Tax Tech Strategy: Integrate Technology for Compliance Fonoa 10–12 min

09🎥Beyond the Return: How AI and Automation Are Reshaping Tax Preparation Wolters Kluwer / CCH 50–60 min

Week total: 2 articles + 1 webinar · ~72–87 min

Week 4 · 22–26 June

The Strategic Lens: From Compliance Tool to Business Partner

08📖Beyond Compliance: How Tax Professionals Are Becoming Strategic Advisors Wolters Kluwer / CCH 8–10 min

11📖5 Key Indirect Tax Trends from SYNAPSE 2026 Fonoa 10–12 min

36📖Vertex Announces Strategic Investment in Kintsugi: What It Means for the Market Vertex / Kintsugi 6–8 min

Week total: 3 articles · ~24–30 min

Month One total: 9 articles + 1 webinar · ~148–181 min

*any cool content I’ve missed? please let me know.

A selection of open roles across tax tech vendors and tax advisory/consulting businesses who are involved in tax technology.

Use the column headers to sort, or the (new) search function and don’t forget to navigate all pages!

*I do this using an AI agent and due to the volume, I don’t check every link, so please let me know if any of these don’t work or have disappeared when you follow them.

✌ Last thoughts

Thanks again for reading! If you have any feedback, suggestions, want to contribute, share gossip or would like to work together in any way, email me here or hit the button below!

Nexus Tax Tech Issue 10: Taxtech Public Markets Q1'26

Nexus Tax Technology — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 06:02:06 GMT

👶The Nexus Turns 10 (weeks)

So 10 weeks in and I wanted to share a milestone with you, the nexus now has over 500 subscribers!! and the growth rate isn’t slowing down! Because I love GTM and stats, here are some from the last 2 and a bit months:

Subscriber Acquisition

2000 LinkedIn connection requests sent (200/wk limit)
1533 new linkedin connections (c90% outbound, approx. 69% connect rate)
1533 manual “please signup” emails (100% follow up!)
515 subcribers (34% conversion rate)

Content

6 Vendor analyses, 3 special features
173 pages of research
1512 jobs posted
33 events shared
23 LinkedIn posts
14 hours of elearning curated

Engagement (the best bit!)

100’s of 1:1 emails
>25 meetings, coffees and chats

It’s been great fun and I’ve had many really rewarding and interesting interactions and I’m so thankful to all of you whether you joined in week 1 or yesterday, I genuinely think we’re onto something.

And particularly for everyone who engages with the content on LinkedIn and refers their network to the sub. This really helps me spread the message and saves me time as I’ve found out that growing subscribers takes as much time, if not more, than creating the content!

Elswehere in the nexus
So this week the news has been slow, hence the chance to look inward but elsewhere my friends at Harvey John have released their 2026 Salary Guide a must read for anyone in the sector.

So enough on the present, now a look at the past and the future!

1️⃣Q1 Public Markets Insights

The Machine Is Running. Are You In Front Of It?

Q1 2026 Tax Technology Market Review — The Nexus

The Q1 2026 earnings season closed last month. Ten companies. Four months of results. One signal that cuts through all of it:

The enterprise cloud migration cycle is generating the largest compliance software procurement pipeline in a decade.

That’s the headline. Here’s the story behind it.

Two Markets in One Quarter

Q1 2026 did not produce a single verdict. It produced two.

At the platform layer — the ERP and commerce giants that are the structural demand engine for everything downstream — momentum is building. Oracle grew cloud revenue 44%. Shopify crossed $100 billion in a single quarter of merchant GMV. Microsoft Dynamics 365 hit its fastest growth pace in four quarters at +22%. SAP’s cloud backlog sits at €21.9 billion and growing. These are not software companies having a good quarter. They are infrastructure companies confirming that the enterprise cloud migration cycle is in full swing, with years left to run.

At the specialist layer — the tax-focused vendors sitting downstream of those platforms — the picture is more nuanced. Some are accelerating. One is flashing amber. And the most consequential number in the whole report isn’t a growth rate: it’s an NRR compression from 109 to 105 at the only pure-play listed indirect tax vendor. That compression tells you something about where expansion revenue is going.

The ERP Machine

Start with Oracle, because the Oracle story is unlike anything else in enterprise software right now.

Total revenue of $17.2 billion, up 22%. Cloud at $8.9 billion, up 44%. Striking numbers. But the figure that matters for the tax technology market is the Remaining Performance Obligation: $553 billion — up 325% from $130 billion a year ago.

RPO is committed future spend. Signed contracts not yet billed. $553 billion in committed multi-year enterprise cloud spend means Oracle is staring at a decade-long implementation pipeline — and every Fusion ERP and NetSuite go-live inside that pipeline is a procurement trigger for the compliance layer. Tax engine evaluation. E-invoicing certification. Jurisdiction coverage review. Every single one.

SAP tells a similar story. The cloud backlog — €21.9 billion, growing 25% constant currency — is the S/4HANA migration queue made visible. Every organisation in that backlog will, at some point in the next 36 months, need to certify their indirect tax configuration in a new ERP environment.

Microsoft Dynamics completes the picture at the mid-market. Dynamics 365 at +22% in the January–March quarter, with growth across Finance, Supply Chain, and Business Central, confirms the migration cycle is broad-based — not concentrated in the enterprise tier. It is happening across the full market.

For tax technology vendors with certified integrations across SAP, Oracle, and Dynamics, this is structural tailwind that doesn’t require marketing. The pipeline arrives by itself.

Commerce at Scale

Shopify’s quarter deserves its own paragraph.

$101 billion in merchant GMV — the first time a single commerce platform has cleared $100 billion in a calendar quarter outside the hyperscaler marketplace giants. Shop Pay processed $35 billion of that, up 59%. International Shop Pay GMV grew over 70%.

That volume is not abstract. It is hundreds of millions of transactions with indirect tax obligations across hundreds of jurisdictions. Every new Shopify merchant is a new taxable entity navigating economic nexus, VAT registration thresholds, and in many cases real-time reporting requirements.

Shopify’s January 2026 decision to lock tax override capabilities for French and Spanish merchants — enforcing NF525 and Verifactu compliance at the platform layer — is the most underreported signal of the quarter. The platform is beginning to absorb compliance at the point of transaction. That’s not just a product decision. It’s a statement about where the compliance layer is moving.

The Cloud Accounting Quartet

The accounting software segment in Q1 2026 is running four separate storylines simultaneously.

Sage is accelerating cleanly. Cloud-native revenue re-accelerated to 25% growth — reversing modest easing from the prior year — driven by Sage Intacct adoption and Copilot embedding. ARR at £2.7 billion and growing. Management raised full-year guidance. This is the clearest proof in the segment that AI product investment can convert directly into new-logo momentum rather than just cost reduction.

Xero — reporting its full fiscal year to March 2026 — grew revenue 31% overall and 21% organically. Net subscriber additions nearly doubled year-on-year to 750,000. The US is inflecting dramatically via the Melio B2B payments integration, adding 110,000 US customers in a single year. In the UK, where Xero has effectively captured the cloud-native SMB accounting segment, double-digit organic growth continues. For tax technology vendors with Xero integrations, the subscriber trajectory is a direct and accelerating demand signal.

Wolters Kluwer is the most consistent performer in this group — and that consistency is underrated. Organic growth of 5%, cloud software up 14% for the second consecutive comparable quarter. Steady, predictable, self-funding. But the more interesting signal is product: the CCH Axcess Advisor early adopter programme, active throughout Q1 2026 with 40-plus firms, is the most consequential new product in the accounting professional segment this period. Its framing — advisory opportunity identification embedded within compliance workflows — directly addresses the business model transition that accounting firms have been attempting manually for years. If it delivers at general availability, it accelerates the shift from compliance billing to advisory billing across the firm segment, with downstream implications for how much time firms spend on tax automation tooling.

Intuit is the complicated one. Revenue of $8.56 billion, up 10%. QuickBooks Online accounting growing at 22%. Those are solid numbers. But simultaneously: a 17% workforce cut, 3,000-plus employees, significant restructuring charges, and a sharp after-hours share decline. CEO Sasan Goodarzi’s framing — simplify operations to reinvest in AI, including integrations with OpenAI and Anthropic — is coherent. The market’s reaction reflects uncertainty about the gap between the cost of that transition and the revenue it will eventually generate. For accounting firms running on Intuit infrastructure, service continuity during the reset is worth monitoring.

Four vendors. Four growth profiles. Two pulling away, one compounding quietly, one restructuring toward a position it doesn’t yet fully occupy.

The Specialist Vendors

Thomson Reuters and Vertex are the two companies that tell the most about the specialist compliance market — and they tell different stories.

Thomson Reuters accelerated at the group level, growing revenue 10% with organic growth of 8%, up from 6% in the prior year. But the more important number is in the segment mix. Tax & Accounting Professionals grew 10% organic, Corporates grew 9% organic — both holding at the top of the range and both ahead of the prior year. The January 2026 launch of ONESOURCE Sales and Use Tax AI — reporting 65% reduction in routine reporting time and 75% reduction in audit exposure for early adopters — is the most commercially significant product launch in the accounting professional segment this period. It places AI directly into the highest-frequency, highest-friction compliance workflow for US accounting practices. Thomson Reuters is not just growing; it is demonstrating that AI investment translates into measurable workflow outcomes that buyers will pay for.

Vertex is the most important company in this report for understanding where the specialist compliance market is heading under pressure.

Revenue up 11.1%. Cloud up 20.7%. ARR up 11.2%. Positive numbers in isolation. Against the prior year — cloud at 29.6%, ARR at 17.9% — they represent real and visible deceleration. Net Revenue Retention compressed from 109 to 105. A 9% workforce reduction was announced in the same quarter.

This is not a crisis. The Brinta acquisition in LatAm is strategically sharp, the business remains profitable, and management held full-year revenue guidance while raising earnings guidance. But NRR compression is not a vanity metric. It is the most precise signal available about customer expansion behaviour — and the direction of travel is worth watching closely.

The question the Vertex results put on the table is structural: is the deceleration specific to Vertex, or is it a read-through to the broader indirect tax specialist segment across the 4 major SaaS vendors? One data point is not a trend but it raises a question the market should be asking — about where expansion revenue is going? Internal AI tool build out, platform native capability or the slew of new market entrants (my bet!)

What It Means for the Ecosystem

Reading the platform data through the lens of the broader ecosystem produces three clear conclusions.

For enterprise compliance vendors with certified ERP integrations: the demand pipeline is the strongest in at least five years, and it is non-discretionary. SAP’s backlog, Oracle’s RPO, and Dynamics’ growth are not marketing. They are forward orders.

For the specialist compliance vendors — the private players, the e-invoicing specialists, the digital-native API-first vendors serving the SaaS economy — the read-through from Shopify’s GMV, Xero’s subscriber adds, and the ERP migration wave is an expanding addressable market that requires no market share gains to benefit from. It simply requires being embedded in the right platforms.

For the consulting and implementation practices that convert all of this into running systems: this is a generational moment. An S/4HANA or Oracle Fusion implementation runs 18–36 months from contract to go-live. SAP’s current backlog is already generating billable work that will not complete until 2028. The Big 4 tax technology advisory practices and specialist boutiques are looking at a pipeline that is both large and structurally urgent and wondering can they address it?

The Landing Punch

The compliance layer is not a cost centre waiting to be automated away. It is infrastructure that grows in complexity every time a platform crosses a new transaction threshold and every time an ERP migration creates a procurement trigger.

Q1 2026 confirmed that both of those forces are accelerating simultaneously, across every market tier from enterprise ERP to SMB cloud accounting.

The question is not whether the market is growing. The question is who is positioned at the intersections where the demand is concentrating — and who is still competing in the segments that platforms are quietly absorbing.

The machine is running. The operators who understand where it is going next are the ones worth following.

This is not investment advice

Want the full 14 page analyst report?

A selection of of opportunities to connect in person and interact online over the next few weeks

June 2026

Peppol Conference Europe 2026 (Conference)

OpenPeppol | 16–17 June 2026 | Steigenberger Icon Wiltcher’s Hotel, Brussels, Belgium

OpenPeppol’s flagship annual European conference bringing together policymakers, Peppol Authorities, service providers, and global enterprises to discuss the future of interoperable digital trade, e-invoicing, and real-time compliance across the Peppol network.

Event Page →

Compliance Connect Europe 2026 (Conference)

Pagero / Thomson Reuters | 18 June 2026 | Bishopsgate, London, UK

A flagship single-day event where finance, tax, trade, and IT leaders come together to explore what’s next in global regulatory compliance and how to build always-on readiness. Distinguished speakers cover policy, AI & automation, and regulatory roll-out across key markets.

ITR Indirect Tax Forum 2026 (Conference)

International Tax Review | 23–24 June 2026 | Amsterdam, Netherlands

ITR’s flagship indirect tax conference bringing together senior in-house indirect tax professionals and industry experts for two days of curated discussion on VAT, e-invoicing, and digital transformation. Vertex and Fintua among sponsors.

KPMG Tax & Legal Tech Summit — Make It Happen (Conference)

KPMG | 25 June 2026 | SIX ConventionPoint, Zurich, Switzerland

The 2nd KPMG Tax & Legal Tech Summit convenes visionary leaders to shape the future of tax and legal technology. Attendees explore how generative AI, advanced analytics, and intelligent automation are being applied in real-world environments, with practical takeaways from peers and KPMG specialists.

The Future of Tax Is Tech-Savvy (Webinar)

insightsoftware / KPMG | 25 June 2026, 14:00 BST / 09:00 EST | Online

Featuring KPMG’s Global Tax Transformation Leader alongside insightsoftware, this webinar examines how the corporate tax role is being redefined by technology — and how the right platform choices make the difference between keeping up and leading.

AUGUST 2026

US International Tax Course 2026 (Course)

TEI — Tax Executives Institute | 3–7 August 2026 | TBC

*any organisers or events I’ve missed? please let me know.

A curated selection of blogs, white-papers and on demand content published by multiple organisartions across the landscape, organised into a themed learning path.

MONTH ONE · JUNE 2026

Landscape, AI Strategy & the New Shape of the Tax Tech Market

Week 1 · 1–5 June

The State of the Market: What the Data Actually Says

01 📖 6 Insights from the 2026 Corporate Tax Technology Report Thomson Reuters Institute / TEI 10–12 min

02 📖 2026 Indirect Tax Trends Vertex Inc. 8–10 min

03 📖 The Future of Tax: Connected Modeling and an AI-Enabled Tax Function KPMG 8–10 min

Week total: 3 articles · ~26–32 min

Week 2 · 8–12 June

AI in Practice: From Bolt-On Tools to Agentic Workflows

04 📖 Survive or Thrive? 2026 Will Test Tax Teams’ Limits Wolters Kluwer / CCH 6–8 min

05 📖 Indirect Tax Transformation: Navigating Change, Embracing Technology Thomson Reuters 10–12 min

07 📖 AI Tools for Tax Professionals: Automate Smarter, Not Harder Sphere 10–12 min

Week total: 3 articles · ~26–32 min

Week 3 · 15–19 June

The New Vendor Landscape: Enterprise to AI-Native, and Everything Between

06📖Best Sales Tax Software for SaaS Companies: 2026 Guide Kintsugi 12–15 min

10📖Tax Tech Strategy: Integrate Technology for Compliance Fonoa 10–12 min

09🎥Beyond the Return: How AI and Automation Are Reshaping Tax Preparation Wolters Kluwer / CCH 50–60 min

Week total: 2 articles + 1 webinar · ~72–87 min

Week 4 · 22–26 June

The Strategic Lens: From Compliance Tool to Business Partner

08📖Beyond Compliance: How Tax Professionals Are Becoming Strategic Advisors Wolters Kluwer / CCH 8–10 min

11📖5 Key Indirect Tax Trends from SYNAPSE 2026 Fonoa 10–12 min

36📖Vertex Announces Strategic Investment in Kintsugi: What It Means for the Market Vertex / Kintsugi 6–8 min

Week total: 3 articles · ~24–30 min

June total: 9 articles + 1 webinar · ~148–181 min

*any cool content I’ve missed? please let me know.

A selection of open roles across tax tech vendors and tax advisory/consulting businesses who are involved in tax technology.

Use the column headers to sort, or the (new) search function and don’t forget to navigate all pages!

*I do this using an AI agent and due to the volume, I don’t check every link, so please let me know if any of these don’t work or have disappeared when you follow them.

✌ Last thoughts

Thanks again for reading! If you have any feedback, suggestions, want to contribute, share gossip or would like to work together in any way, email me here or hit the button below!

Nexus Tax Tech Issue 9: Fintua

Nexus Tax Technology — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 06:01:53 GMT

TL;DR , Fonoa and Avalara updates, 142 new Jobs, 8 events, 3:01 hours of learning and Fintua vendor profile

This week in Taxtech: A New owner for PwC’s Edge & a new CEO for Avalara

Somewhat annoyingly, just as I’d completed and published the Fonoa Vendor profile, they went ahead and acquired Edge from PwC and raised their Series C which is really cool news but sadly means my analysis was immediately rendered out of date. I’ll work to update this in the background but for now here’s my take on the new news:

My quick take on this:

✅ Gets them out of the digital services pigeonhole (for reporting)

Fonoa’s stack was credible but contextually narrow — reviewers and analysts (including this one) kept appending “for digital services businesses.” Edge changes that framing overnight. A VAT/GST compliance and e-filing system used by global enterprises across industries is not a niche play. Fonoa can now walk into a traditional multinational with a reporting capability that doesn’t require the buyer to be a marketplace or a SaaS company to see the value.

✅ Provides cross-sell opportunity into the Edge base

Edge’s existing client base almost certainly has indirect tax determination, e-invoicing, and tax-ID validation needs that Fonoa’s core platform was built to solve. They now own the relationship and the right to have that conversation — without winning a single new logo. That installed base is the most valuable commercial asset in this deal, and it compounds: every Edge client that Fonoa upsells onto the broader platform becomes evidence that the unified lifecycle story isn’t just positioning.

✅ Adds some 💶 runway after a long funding gap

Forty-four months between priced rounds is a long time to be running on Series B fumes, whatever the internal cash dynamics actually looked like. The $110M Series C resolves that publicly — it resets the conversation with enterprise procurement teams who were quietly asking the runway question, restores the narrative momentum needed to accelerate hiring, and (hopefully) gives Fonoa the capital to actually integrate two acquisitions simultaneously without a race to profitability forcing product compromises. The timing, a day before we published this profile, was either very good luck or very deliberate.

✅ Cements a structurally differentiated relationship with PwC (started with GITC)

One acquisition from a Big 4 firm is opportunistic. Two is a strategy. PwC is now an anchor customer across both GITC and Edge, a named endorser at the Global Tax & Legal Services Leader level, and the most recognisable brand in professional services telling the market that Fonoa is where it sends its compliance infrastructure when it wants to divest. No other indirect tax challenger has that (since 2010 anyway when TR bought Deloitte’s abacus). It also creates a quiet distribution lever: every PwC indirect tax engagement globally is now a potential conversation about Fonoa’s platform, without Fonoa having to run a single sales motion to get in the room.

⚠️ How much of Edge is actually SaaS and how much is PwC service wraparound

This is the question that should be at the top of everyone’s list, and the one Fonoa has the least incentive to answer publicly. Edge was built inside a consulting firm to support consulting engagement and to support PwC’s managed compliance services. The pattern is consistent: these tools were designed to make PwC’s people more efficient, not to stand alone. If a meaningful portion of Edge’s revenue only flows when a PwC partner is in the room, Fonoa hasn’t bought a SaaS product — it’s bought a dependency. The valuation multiple, the integration thesis, and the cross-sell story all look materially different depending on the answer.

⚠️ The single platform story just got complicated

This was Fonoa’s cleanest competitive advantage over the established market: one data model, one API surface, no acquisition patchwork. That story is now harder to tell. Fonoa is simultaneously integrating GITC (partial exemptions, FS clients, mid-integration as of today) and Edge (transactional monitoring, compliance reporting, enterprise multi-industry clients, just announced). Two acquisitions in eighteen months, both from the same firm, both requiring data model reconciliation with the unified platform — that’s not a roadmap risk, it’s an execution test. The “we built it once, right” positioning was always the implicit dig at legacy vendors who stitched together their global footprint through M&A. Fonoa just became that vendor, at least temporarily. The question is how long “temporarily” lasts.

🍊So last week Avalara got a new CEO, big news for sure and anyone who’s ever worked othere will understand how deep the cult of orange culture that Scott McFarlane created goes. But it got me thinking, what does it mean for Avalara’s customers and employees?

We already know what they think of Avalara but what sort of experience did Narrazin create at Udemy and what does that tell us about what’s potentially coming down the line?

Let’s look at the data:

✅ Customer Sentiment - Good News - G2, #NPS and Gartner all ahead of Avalara’s

On the customer side, Udemy holds a consistent edge across every B2B review platform — 4.5/5 on G2 against Avalara’s 4.0, matched on Gartner Peer Insights, and ahead on NPS (42 vs an estimated low-to-mid 30s for Avalara post-take-private). The gap isn’t dramatic, but the direction of travel is. Avalara’s scores are declining; Udemy’s are stable. The shared weak point is support quality — both vendors draw the same complaint — but for Avalara it’s a structural deterioration tied to Vista-era cost extraction, not a product problem. That distinction matters for renewal conversations.

⚠️ CEO approval - Not so good - Glassdoor has Sarrazin at 43% vs McFarlane at 56% ✅ Employee Sentiment - culture, benefits & general health all ahead at Udemy

The employee picture tells a sharper story. Udemy’s 3.7 Glassdoor rating sits half a point above Avalara’s 3.2, which has fallen 7% in twelve months — three consecutive years of declining scores that point to something structural rather than cyclical. Fifty percent of Avalara employees would recommend working there; 64% would at Udemy. The one metric Avalara wins is CEO approval: McFarlane’s 56% reflects founder credibility doing real work against a difficult backdrop, while Sarrazin’s 43% reflects a new leader making unpopular calls — RTO, merger, layoffs — without enough tenure yet to build trust. Culture and values is where the divergence is most acute: Avalara reviewers frame everything in a before/after structure — before Vista, after Vista — that describes ownership-era regression, not drift.

🚨 GTM - Oh dear - RepVue #PMF down and #quota attainment way below (and Avalara was already pretty bad on that one)

GTM is where the comparison gets uncomfortable for Udemy. Quota attainment of 27.1% is roughly half the cloud SaaS benchmark and less than half Avalara’s ~41% — and Avalara itself is below par. The structural reason is product-market fit: Avalara’s 4.4/5 PMF score reflects regulatory-mandatory demand where the sale is largely about implementation timing, not conviction. Udemy competes in discretionary L&D spend, typically the first line item cut in a cost cycle, which makes the enterprise motion materially harder regardless of product quality. Revenue per employee tells the other side of that story — Udemy’s ~$631K reflects genuine marketplace leverage; Avalara’s lower ratio reflects the cost of running a compliance infrastructure business at scale. Both numbers are defensible. Only one of the GTM machines is currently working.

🇮🇪 Vendor Spotlight: Fintua

Fintua: The Self-Funding Compliance Stack That VAT Recovery Built

Every CFO is sitting on a pot of unreclaimed VAT they don’t know about. Fintua — formerly Taxback International, now rebranded and retooled as a SaaS compliance platform — has built its entire commercial logic around that fact. As VAT recovery funds compliance, and as e-invoicing mandates from Warsaw to Brussels accelerate through 2025 and 2026, the question is whether a 30-year-old services business can complete its SaaS transformation before the next wave of complexity lands.

What Fintua Actually Is

Fintua is a Kilkenny-based indirect tax platform — part of the CluneTech group — covering VAT/GST compliance and returns (Comply), e-invoicing and CTC (eInvoice, delivered in partnership with RTC Suite’s SAP BTP-native stack), VAT recovery on employee and AP spend (Recover), and cross-border VAT payments (Pay). Its centre of gravity is European VAT compliance and international VAT reclaim, not US sales & use tax, and not real-time tax determination — Fintua has no standalone calculation engine, which is the sharpest boundary condition in the portfolio.

Scale: approximately 500 employees (LeadIQ, October 2025), 12,000+ corporate clients across 109 countries including Fortune 500 names, and VAT recovery coverage in 180+ countries. Revenue is not separately disclosed from CluneTech group; the profile estimates services (reclaim) at 35–45% of revenue and Comply SaaS at 25–35%, with eInvoice, Pay, and advisory making up the balance. CluneTech is privately held with no disclosed external funding — a stability signal and an opacity one simultaneously.

The buyer who puts Fintua on a longlist is a multinational finance or tax director managing cross-border VAT filings across Europe, running meaningful travel and AP spend with unreclaimed input tax, and looking for a single vendor relationship across compliance, e-invoicing, and — crucially — recovery. If your team is building that business case, the numbers on recoverable VAT will almost always surprise you.

Where It Beats the Market Baseline

The self-funding model is genuinely unusual and consistently undersold. Fintua’s Recover product operates on a contingency basis — it earns a share of recovered VAT on travel, hotel, and AP spend across 180+ countries. For a multinational business with significant European supplier and travel spend, that reclaim can run to six or seven figures annually and materially offset the cost of Comply and eInvoice. No pure-SaaS compliance platform offers this dynamic. It is not a gimmick: it is a structural TCO advantage that buyers routinely miss because they compare headline SaaS pricing without modelling the recovery offset.

VAT filing coverage is genuinely broad: 109 countries for managed filing services, with 30 years of operational depth that no challenger built in the last five years can replicate. The Conferma partnership and SAP Concur App Center listing for Recover validate the operational maturity of the recovery motion at scale. And the RTC Suite partnership meaningfully upgrades the e-invoicing story — RTC is a SAP Build & OEM Partner, Peppol and EESPA member, with EY and Alvarez & Marsal as SI partners — bringing SAP BTP-native CTC coverage for Italy SDI, Poland KSeF, Belgium Peppol, and Germany XRechnung into Fintua’s platform.

Where Fintua is at or below baseline: no tax calculation engine (a firm gap, not a roadmap item); no US S&U depth beyond a service add-on; no Big-4 / SI partnership in Fintua’s own name; zero peer reviews on G2, Capterra, TrustRadius, or Gartner Peer Insights under either brand; and API maturity that is not yet developer-portal-grade.

Portfolio Analysis

Fintua’s portfolio shape is that of a services business in mid-transition to SaaS — not a built-from-scratch platform company. Recover (VAT reclaim) is the oldest, deepest, and most operationally mature product line; it funds the others, both commercially and reputationally. Comply (VAT returns) is the primary SaaS growth bet and the product Fintua markets most aggressively to new enterprise buyers. eInvoice is strategically important and now better supported by the RTC Suite partnership, but it is early-stage in terms of commercial maturity and the product boundary between what Fintua delivers and what RTC delivers is not publicly documented. Pay is the most speculative line — cross-border payments via what is almost certainly TransferMate’s rails — and potentially the most interesting for digital and e-commerce buyers who need to close the compliance-to-settlement loop without stitching two vendors together.

The practical implication for operators: this is a services-plus-SaaS portfolio, not a clean-room platform. Different products are at very different levels of maturity, the brand transition from Taxback International is still landing, and the managed-service heritage means implementation motions and commercial structures may blend services and software fees in ways that require careful diligence. The Autodesk webinar reference is a strong signal of enterprise SaaS traction, but it is currently a data point of one, not a validated pattern.

Business Model and Size Band Fits

Business model fit

• B2B/B2C services (non-digital): 3 – Strong fit. the natural home. Managed filing, advisory, and recovery depth align cleanly with professional services, financial services, and enterprise service businesses managing cross-border VAT.
• B2B goods: 2 – Good fit. solid for compliance and recovery on procurement spend; no calculation engine limits the upstream determination use case.
• B2C goods: 2 – Good fit. good for cross-border e-commerce with European VAT exposure; Pay adds settlement value; no e-commerce platform integrations and no OSS/IOSS self-serve automation limit the ceiling.
• B2B/B2C digital services: 2 – Good fit. — Comply covers multi-jurisdiction VAT filing, RTC Suite covers mandated e-invoicing, and Pay closes the settlement loop. Still no calculation engine for real-time transaction tax.

Size band fit

• Medium: 2 – Good fit. the sweet spot — multi-country VAT, meaningful travel and AP spend, SAP/Oracle/Dynamics ERP, enough complexity to justify the platform. Recover’s self-funding dynamic lands best here.
• Large: 2 – Good fit. credible for European multinationals with managed-service appetite; RTC Suite strengthens the SAP enterprise story. SI partner thinness and review footprint absence are procurement friction points.
• Small: 1 – Patchy fit. generally over-engineered and potentially over-priced without sufficient recoverable VAT to offset subscription costs.

Customer and Employee Sentiments

Customer sentiment is structurally unusual: Fintua has 12,000+ clients and 30 years in market, but zero reviews on G2, Capterra, TrustRadius, and Gartner Peer Insights under either brand. The most likely explanation is that the legacy Taxback International go-to-market relied entirely on referral and relationship sales — review platforms were simply not part of the motion. The rebrand has not yet generated a peer-review base. For buyers, this means reference calls are mandatory, not optional.

What is available is directionally positive:

• FeaturedCustomers (curated): 21 testimonials, 23 case studies, 9 videos — consistently praise VAT recovery quality, specialist domain knowledge, long-term relationship management (5+ years cited), and proactive account engagement.
• SAP Concur App Center: Recover listed as a trusted integration — implicit validation of technical and compliance standards without a public rating.
• Irish Accountancy Awards 2025: Best Use of Technology in Accounting & Finance and Client Services Award — credibility signal in the accountant channel.
• Tax Intelligence Frankfurt 2026: Fintua presented alongside RTC on reconciling VAT returns with e-invoicing data — active practitioner community presence.

Employee sentiment (Glassdoor, ~37 reviews under legacy Taxback entities): 3.3/5 overall, 3.1 on compensation, 3.6 on work-life balance. The 38% of staff with 11+ tenure is the standout data point — it signals genuine culture stickiness but also a talent base still weighted toward services roles rather than SaaS product and engineering. No RepVue data found for either brand.

Operator implication: strong managed-service delivery culture and high client retention are the clearest positive signals. SaaS product experience and commercial aggressiveness are harder to assess without peer reviews; expect the diligence process to be heavier than for a vendor with an established review footprint.

If You’re Building or Buying Indirect Tax Capability — Here’s the Read

For buyers

If you’re a medium or large enterprise finance team managing cross-border VAT across Europe, with meaningful employee-expense and AP spend, this vendor belongs on your shortlist — and the first thing you should do before any other analysis is model your recoverable VAT. Run the Recover numbers with your travel, hotel, and supplier spend data before you compare Fintua’s headline pricing against anything else. The net TCO picture will look different, and in some cases the platform is effectively self-funding.

If you’re an accounting or tax advisory firm wanting a platform to run client VAT compliance on, ‘Comply for Accountants’ is a named product, the advisory partner network (Forvis Mazars, WTS Global, KMLZ) adds depth, and the two Irish Accountancy Awards in 2025 are a genuine credibility signal in that channel. Shortlist with confidence and pilot on one client first.

If you’re an e-commerce or digital services business managing multi-currency VAT settlement, the combination of Comply, eInvoice/RTC, and Pay is more compelling than it looks on first pass — it is one of the few vendor relationships that covers the full compliance-to-payment workflow without a second contract. Confirm the Pay infrastructure (TransferMate relationship) and the RTC Suite integration SLA ownership before signing.

If you need real-time tax determination, do not shortlist Fintua. There is no calculation engine. This is a firm boundary, not a roadmap item. Source that capability separately and treat Fintua as a complement for compliance, recovery, and e-invoicing.

Regardless of segment: zero peer reviews on any structured platform means reference calls are not a nice-to-have. Request three calls with current SaaS clients (Comply and eInvoice, not legacy managed-service accounts) who went live in the last 24 months before you commit.

For prospective employees

• Strong move for tax domain specialists and managed-service delivery professionals: 30 years of operational depth, genuine jurisdictional breadth, and a client base that demands real expertise.
• Potentially attractive for SaaS product and implementation roles: the platform pivot is real and underway, but comp competitiveness (3.1/5 on Glassdoor) may not yet match pure-SaaS employer comparables — negotiate accordingly.
• The high-tenure culture is a double-edged signal: strong knowledge base and stable environment, but potentially slower career velocity than a venture-backed growth-stage platform.
• No RepVue data means sales org health is unverifiable publicly — ask directly about quota attainment, territory design, and pipeline generation support before accepting an AE or BDR offer.
• CluneTech group structure provides cross-business mobility (TransferMate, Immedis, Sprintax) as a retention and development lever — understand what that looks like in practice before evaluating the role purely on Fintua’s own footprint.

Want the full 26 page analyst report?

A selection of of opportunities to connect in person and interact online over the next few weeks

June 2026

**E-Invoicing Webinar Series (Webinar)**
**EDICOM** | 4–9 June 2026 | Online/Virtual
A series of educational sessions covering e-invoicing compliance across different regions and sectors, including global enterprises, law firms, and APAC-specific implementation, co-presented with Deloitte and KPMG respectively.
[Register →](https://edicomgroup.com/resources/webinars)

**Modernising E-Commerce with AI-Enabled Strategies: Shopify, Microsoft, and Vertex (Webinar)**
**Vertex, Inc.** | 9 June 2026, 14:00–15:00 EDT | Online/Virtual
A joint webinar exploring how AI-enabled tax and compliance strategies are transforming e-commerce operations, covering automated tax determination, real-time compliance, and the integration of Vertex’s engine within the Shopify and Microsoft ecosystem.
[Register →](https://www.vertexinc.com/resources/upcoming-webcasts-events)

**8th Annual VAT Management Summit (Conference)**
**Uniglobal** | 9–10 June 2026 | London, UK
Uniglobal’s annual London gathering for senior VAT managers and indirect tax leaders from multinational corporations, focused on VAT governance, technology, e-invoicing readiness, and compliance management across complex global organisations.
[Register →](https://www.uni-global.eu/future-events/)

Trade and Tariff Tuesdays — June (Webinar)
Avalara | June 16, 2026 | Online/Virtual
Avalara experts provide guidance on evolving international trade and tariff policy and its business implications in this recurring webinar session.
Register →

KPMG | June 25, 2026 | Zurich, Switzerland Summit focused on AI, analytics, and automation transforming tax and legal functions.

Event Page → https://kpmg.com/ch/en/events/2026/06/tax-legal-tech-summit.html

**The Future of Tax Is Tech-Savvy (Webinar)**
**insightsoftware / KPMG** | 25 June 2026, 14:00 BST / 09:00 EST | Online/Virtual
Featuring KPMG’s Global Tax Transformation Leader alongside insightsoftware, this webinar examines how the corporate tax role is being redefined by technology — and how the right platform choices make the difference between keeping up and leading.
[Register →](https://insightsoftware.com/resources/the-future-of-tax-is-tech-savvy/)

July 2026

Global Withholding Tax Summit 2026 (In-Person)

Withholding Tax Summit | July 1, 2026 | London, UK Conference dedicated to withholding tax and cross-border compliance challenges, with emphasis on regulatory change and digitalisation.

Event Page → https://withholdingtaxsummit.com/

*any organisers or events I’ve missed? please let me know.

A curated selection of blogs, white-papers and on demand content published by multiple organisartions across the landscape, organised into a themed learning path.

MONTH ONE · JUNE 2026

Landscape, AI Strategy & the New Shape of the Tax Tech Market

Week 1 · 1–5 June

The State of the Market: What the Data Actually Says

01 📖 6 Insights from the 2026 Corporate Tax Technology Report Thomson Reuters Institute / TEI 10–12 min

02 📖 2026 Indirect Tax Trends Vertex Inc. 8–10 min

03 📖 The Future of Tax: Connected Modeling and an AI-Enabled Tax Function KPMG 8–10 min

Week total: 3 articles · ~26–32 min

Week 2 · 8–12 June

AI in Practice: From Bolt-On Tools to Agentic Workflows

04 📖 Survive or Thrive? 2026 Will Test Tax Teams’ Limits Wolters Kluwer / CCH 6–8 min

05 📖 Indirect Tax Transformation: Navigating Change, Embracing Technology Thomson Reuters 10–12 min

07 📖 AI Tools for Tax Professionals: Automate Smarter, Not Harder Sphere 10–12 min

Week total: 3 articles · ~26–32 min

Week 3 · 15–19 June

The New Vendor Landscape: Enterprise to AI-Native, and Everything Between

06📖Best Sales Tax Software for SaaS Companies: 2026 Guide Kintsugi 12–15 min

10📖Tax Tech Strategy: Integrate Technology for Compliance Fonoa 10–12 min

09🎥Beyond the Return: How AI and Automation Are Reshaping Tax Preparation Wolters Kluwer / CCH 50–60 min

Week total: 2 articles + 1 webinar · ~72–87 min

Week 4 · 22–26 June

The Strategic Lens: From Compliance Tool to Business Partner

08📖Beyond Compliance: How Tax Professionals Are Becoming Strategic Advisors Wolters Kluwer / CCH 8–10 min

11📖5 Key Indirect Tax Trends from SYNAPSE 2026 Fonoa 10–12 min

36📖Vertex Announces Strategic Investment in Kintsugi: What It Means for the Market Vertex / Kintsugi 6–8 min

Week total: 3 articles · ~24–30 min

Month One total: 9 articles + 1 webinar · ~148–181 min

*any cool content I’ve missed? please let me know.

A selection of open roles across tax tech vendors and tax advisory/consulting businesses who are involved in tax technology.

Use the column headers to sort, or the (new) search function and don’t forget to navigate all pages!

*I do this using an AI agent and due to the volume, I don’t check every link, so please let me know if any of these don’t work or have disappeared when you follow them.

✌ Last thoughts

Thanks again for reading! If you have any feedback, suggestions, want to contribute, share gossip or would like to work together in any way, email me here or hit the button below!

Nexus Tax Tech Issue 8: Fonoa

Nexus Tax Technology — Thu, 28 May 2026 08:48:38 GMT

TL;DR , Job market analysis, 150 new Jobs, 12 events, 5 hours of learning and Fonoa vendor profile

❤ Current state of tax tech hiring

This week I did a major refresh of the job data and the picture has changed somewhat. Bearing in mind that we’ve also seen some fairly significant headcount reduction activity from vendors like Vertex (discussed previously) and Intuit the tax technology labour market is still in active hiring mode. In particularl CCH, who has a whopping 500+ roles open, seems to be bucking the trend on human capital investment.

Across the 1,197 open positions from 32 employers I compiled, the functional mix tells a market-level story: engineering leads at 228 roles, with tax and compliance advisory close behind at 180 and sales and business development a solid third at 117 — a composition that reflects an industry simultaneously scaling build capacity and commercial reach. Seniority weighting is firmly toward experience, with IC and manager-level roles accounting for nearly 60% of listings and entry-level at just 5%. The US leads on geography at 186 listings, India follows at 142 as a delivery and engineering hub, and the UK sits third at 115, with a further European cluster across Belgium, Germany, Romania, and the Netherlands.

Market concentration is a structural feature of the current data. The Big 4 collectively account for around 150 listings across indirect tax advisory, tax technology consulting, and transfer pricing — active and competitive. Among dedicated vendors, Avalara, Sovos, Thomson Reuters ONESOURCE, and Vertex post between 13 and 71 roles each, a spread that signals meaningfully different growth postures heading into H2 2026. The dataset also captures a cohort of specialist challengers — Fonoa, Sphere, Anrok, Numeral, Marosa — whose targeted listings point to continued build-out across e-invoicing, sales tax automation, and cross-border compliance.

One data point requires context. CCH Wolters Kluwer’s 541 listings represent 45% of the total, creating an inherent skew across market-level aggregates. The remaining 31 employers account for 656 roles — a dataset that reads as more advisory-weighted, more US-concentrated, and with a thinner AI hiring profile (61 roles, 5% of total). The Nexus treats this not as noise to be smoothed over but as signal in its own right: concentration at this level reflects a vendor investing at a different order of magnitude from its peers, and that asymmetry is itself the story.

Now to move onto the first Vendor spotlight in the new series focussed on VAT native tech providers, or as I like to call them, the VAT Challengers.

💻Vendor Spotlight: Fonoa

Built Right (For Digital), Not Built Wide.

Digital-first businesses spent the last decade bolting legacy compliance stacks onto modern architectures. Fonoa was built for the other way around — and as tech enabled sales channels & ViDA’s platform economy and DRR regimes reshape global compliance for this category, the architecture question has become the strategy question.

WHAT FONOA ACTUALLY IS

Fonoa is a Dublin-based indirect tax platform purpose-built for digital services and marketplace businesses — covering VAT/GST determination, tax-ID validation (Lookup), e-invoicing and CTC compliance, compliant invoicing, returns, and an AI-assisted regulatory intelligence layer. The Tax Engine was designed from day one for high-volume, cross-border digital transactions — not adapted from a US goods-first legacy — which shows in both the architecture and the client list: Uber, Netflix, Zoom, Booking.com, Remote, Dell, Intuit, Bolt, and Wellhub. Estimated headcount sits at 170–210, with ~$85–89M in disclosed venture funding across three rounds (last priced July 2022, Series B, Coatue-led). Three capabilities set it apart structurally: a tax determination engine purpose-built for digital services; a standalone tax-ID validation API (Lookup) with 115+ government sources that no established platform matches in breadth; and a single unified platform for returns and e-invoicing covering all regimes — VAT, US sales tax, LATAM CTC — on one data model. If your indirect tax problem is global digital VAT on a modern stack, this goes on your longlist.

WHERE IT BEATS THE MARKET BASELINE

Three structural advantages sit clearly above market baseline. First, the tax determination engine was purpose-built for digital services and marketplace transactions — SaaS, streaming, ride-hail, digital goods — not retrofitted from a goods-first platform. For this ICP the capability is leading; for B2B physical-goods supply chains, HS code classification, and exemption certificates, it drops materially and buyers should look elsewhere. Second, Lookup (tax-ID validation) is a standalone best-in-class USP with no close equivalent: 115+ government sources, fuzzy matching, real-time and batch modes. Established platforms typically embed lighter validators within their determination flow with a fraction of this source breadth. It is worth procuring independently of any broader Fonoa decision. Third, returns and e-invoicing run on a single unified global platform — VAT/GST, US sales tax, and LATAM CTC on one data model, not three inherited products from three separate acquisitions on three different schemas. Legacy vendors assembled their global footprint through regional buys; Fonoa built once. For a global tax team managing multiple regimes simultaneously, the operational benefit compounds. Where Fonoa is at or below baseline: US sales tax and goods content depth, no SAP-certified add-on, a thin SI ecosystem, and no purpose-built managed-services offering.

PORTFOLIO ANALYSIS

Fonoa has followed the classic API-platform arc — Lookup first, then Tax Engine, Invoicing, E-Invoicing/Reporting, Returns — adding one strategic acquisition: PwC’s Global Indirect Tax Compliance (GITC) product in October 2024, importing 40+ financial-services clients and partial-exemption automation. The acquisition count is itself a signal: where established platforms assembled global capability through repeated regional buys — a US filing tool here, a LATAM CTC tool there, a VAT returns engine from somewhere else — Fonoa built a single platform on one data model from day one. Tax Determination and E-Invoicing/CTC are estimated to account for roughly 55–65% of revenue combined, with Lookup adding 15–20% — a high attach rate reflecting its standalone marketability. The GITC deal is the most telling portfolio move: a gated FS vertical acquired without organic win cost, with PwC publicly committing to remain an “enthusiastic customer” post-sale. The gap remains delivery infrastructure — SI partner ecosystem and enterprise implementation capability are thin relative to the complexity of large-scale multi-country deployments.

SEGMENT, DELIVERY MODEL, AND SIZE BAND FITS

Segment archetype fit

• Digital-first: 3 – Strong fit — the home segment. Tax Engine + E-Invoicing + Lookup across Uber, Netflix, Zoom, Booking-scale deployments. No material gaps for this buyer.
• E-commerce (cross-border): 2 – Good fit — strong EMEA VAT/OSS/IOSS depth; US S&U home-rule coverage and physical-goods workflows are secondary strengths at best.
• Enterprise (traditional multinational): 2 – Good fit — compelling where revenue is digital or services-led; SAP certification gap and thin SI ecosystem limit ceiling for ERP-heavy procurement teams.
• Managed-service-led: 1 – Marginal — some advisory wrap exists at onboarding but Fonoa is not a BPO and should not be evaluated as one.
• Utility / point solution: 3 – Strong fit — Lookup (tax-ID validation) is best-in-class as a discrete API; worth buying even if the broader platform is not in scope.

Delivery model fit

• Software-only: 3 – Strong fit — the native delivery model; API-first, modular, minimal implementation overhead for tech-ready buyers.
• Software + managed services: 1 – Marginal — onboarding hand-holding and CSM support are well-rated; not a full managed-filing or BPO capability.
• Managed-services-led: 1 – Marginal — not Fonoa’s delivery DNA; buyers needing a services-led operating model should look elsewhere.
• Marketplace / self-serve: 2 – Good fit — Lookup in particular can be consumed self-serve via API; pricing is negotiated rather than true freemium.
• Utility: 2 – Good fit — Lookup as a standalone utility is the clearest single-job-to-be-done case in the portfolio.

Size band fit

• Small: 1 – Marginal — over-engineered and likely overpriced for sub-$50M or single-jurisdiction buyers.
• Medium: 3 – Strong fit — $50M–$1B digital businesses with multi-country VAT and modern stacks are the sweet spot.
• Large: 2 – Good fit — serves billion-dollar clients (Uber, Netflix) but partner ecosystem thinness and the SAP certification gap constrain enterprise ceiling.

CUSTOMER AND EMPLOYEE SENTIMENTS

Customer reviews are unusually cohesive — Fonoa’s reviewers are almost entirely enterprise digital-platform buyers, and they broadly like what they bought. Employee signals are more mixed, with the sales organisation the clearest area of concern.

• G2 (4.5/5, 34 reviews): API quality and setup ease (8.7/10) consistently above category average; “best onboarding experience we’ve had with any tax finance provider” is a recurring theme.
• Gartner Peer Insights (4.6/5, 19 reviews; 58% five-star, 42% four-star, zero below): “unique multi-product proposition under one banner” cited repeatedly; geographic completeness flagged as still maturing.
• Glassdoor (4.4/5, 54 reviews): strong on culture, autonomy, and remote-first; growth-stage instability and sales-leadership friction flagged by multiple reviewers.
• RepVue (~24% quota attainment): roughly half the SaaS industry median (~43% for the sector in 2024). The clearest single risk signal in the profile.

The product and CS experience looks solid for the right ICP. But ~24% quota attainment means AE turnover is a live risk during longer procurement cycles — lock down named account owners for continuity in your contract terms.

IF YOU’RE BUILDING OR BUYING INDIRECT TAX CAPABILITY — HERE’S THE READ

For buyers

If you’re a medium or large digital-first business — marketplace, SaaS, platform, ride-hail — with cross-border VAT/GST across 20+ countries and a modern engineering stack, Fonoa belongs near the top of your shortlist. The determination engine was designed for your use case, the unified returns and e-invoicing platform removes the multi-system reconciliation overhead your current stack probably carries, and API quality is genuinely differentiated. If you’re a B2B physical-goods business with complex supply-chain tax obligations — HS codes, exemption logic, goods-specific workflows, SAP-certified add-on requirements — Fonoa is not the right anchor today; look to established ERP-certified platforms. If you need tax-ID validation at scale — for DAC7 compliance, marketplace seller verification, or B2B invoice validation — evaluate Lookup as a standalone procurement regardless of broader platform fit: 115+ government sources with fuzzy matching has no close equivalent in the market and is worth buying on its own. If US sales & use tax is your primary obligation, assess US-specialist platforms first — Fonoa is growing here but it is not its strongest suit. If you are in financial services with partial-exemption complexity, the GITC acquisition makes Fonoa worth a conversation that was not justified 18 months ago. Regardless of where you land, probe hard on three things before signing: SOC 2/ISO attestations (not publicly confirmed), volume-based pricing mechanics at your projected transaction growth rate, and funding runway — no priced primary since July 2022 is a material procurement risk variable you should resolve before committing.

For prospective employees

• Strong move for product and backend engineers: modern cloud-native stack (Kubernetes, GCP, Postgres), remote-first autonomy, and genuine technical complexity in tax-data and CTC plumbing.
• Attractive for tax-technology specialists: regulatory depth in VAT/CTC is real, GITC adds FS exposure, and the AI Tax Intelligence layer is a genuinely interesting career problem.
• High-risk for AEs and BDRs: ~24% quota attainment and reported leadership friction — go in with firm non-negotiables on territory design, targets, and reporting lines.
• Worth assessing for CS and Solutions Engineering: the enterprise ICP delivers complex, interesting work, but sales-org instability can bleed across GTM teams.
• Funding clarity is an open question: a Series C or exit event in the next 12–18 months is plausible; understand how that shapes equity, roadmap commitments, and role stability before you sign.

Want the full 26 page analyst report?

A selection of of opportunities to connect in person and interact online over the next few weeks

June 2026

Tax Tech Live 2026 (In-Person)
Tax Systems | June 2, 2026 | London, UK
Exclusive customer-focused event bringing together tax professionals for a day of cutting-edge insights, expert discussions, and the latest innovations in tax technology. Contact your Tax Systems Client Executive to register.
Event Page →

Private Equity & Private Capital Quarterly Tax Update — Q2 2026 (Webinar)
EY | June 4, 2026 | Online/Virtual
Quarterly update on strategic influences shaping private equity and capital funds, including US legislative updates, global macro trends, and tax implications.
Register →

8th Annual VAT Management Summit (In-Person)
Fintua (Gold Sponsor) | June 9–10, 2026 | The Tower Hotel, London, UK
Summit bringing together industry leaders to explore the latest developments in VAT compliance, digital reporting, and regulatory change.
Event Page →

Trade and Tariff Tuesdays — June (Webinar)
Avalara | June 16, 2026 | Online/Virtual
Avalara experts provide guidance on evolving international trade and tariff policy and its business implications in this recurring webinar session.
Register →

ITR Indirect Tax Forum 2026 (In-Person)
Fintua (Silver Sponsor) / Vertex Inc | June 23–24, 2026 | Amsterdam, Netherlands
Premier indirect tax forum exploring the latest developments in VAT, e-invoicing, and digital transformation, with a focus on practical insights and peer-to-peer exchange.
Register →

Tax & Legal Tech Summit (In-Person)

KPMG | June 25, 2026 | Zurich, Switzerland Summit focused on AI, analytics, and automation transforming tax and legal functions.

Event Page → https://kpmg.com/ch/en/events/2026/06/tax-legal-tech-summit.html

Global Withholding Tax Summit 2026 (In-Person)

Withholding Tax Summit | July 1, 2026 | London, UK Conference dedicated to withholding tax and cross-border compliance challenges, with emphasis on regulatory change and digitalisation.

Event Page → https://withholdingtaxsummit.com/

*any organisers or events I’ve missed? please let me know.

A curated selection of blogs, white-papers and on demand content published by multiple organisartions across the landscape, organised into a themed learning path.

MONTH THREE · JUNE–JULY 2026

Direct Tax, Pillar Two & Corporate Tax Provision

The GIR filing window is now open — calendar-year groups face a June 30, 2026 deadline for their first live GloBE Information Return. The OECD Side-by-Side Package has materially changed what US-headquartered MNEs must do, but QDMTTs remain, GIR obligations continue, and non-US MNEs face unchanged IIR/UTPR exposure. This month goes deep on the technology implications of all of it.

Week 9 · 2–6 June

Pillar Two 2026: The Side-by-Side Package and What It Means for Technology

25 📖 QDMTT: Stay Ahead of the Global Minimum Tax Curve Orbitax (TR) 12–15 min

26 📖 OECD Side-by-Side Package: Relief for US Multinationals RSM US 12–15 min

27 🎥 Pillar Two Compliance: Grant Thornton & Orbitax Strategies Orbitax / Grant Thornton 60 min · CPE

Week total: 2 articles + 1 webinar · ~84–90 min

Week 10 · 9–13 June

Unpacking the Side-by-Side Package & the First GIR Filing Cycle

Having established the context in Week 9, this week goes deeper into the technical and compliance architecture of the new Pillar Two framework — including an authoritative technical breakdown of the four new safe harbours (SbS, UPE, SBTI, and Simplified ETR) and what GIR data collection must look like in practice for first-wave filers.

28 📖 The New Pillar Two Framework: Unboxing the Side-by-Side Package Alvarez & Marsal 15–18 min

29 📖 2026 Indirect Tax Trends Vertex Inc. 8–10 min

30 🎥 Seamless Tax Data Integration: From Any System to Pillar Two Compliance Orbitax / Deloitte 45–60 min

Week total: 2 articles + 1 webinar · ~68–88 min

Week 11 · 16–20 June

BEPS, Transfer Pricing & the Broader Global Reform Landscape

31 📖 Bloomberg Tax Leadership Forum 2025: Global Tax Reform — Are We There Yet? Bloomberg Tax 15–20 min

32 📖 Practical Advice for Managing Pillar Two: Global Minimum Tax Technology BDO / Thomson Reuters 10–12 min

33📖How to Build a Winning Indirect Tax Maturity Roadmap Fonoa 12–15 min

Week total: 3 articles · ~37–47 min

Week 12 · 23–27 June

Capstone: The Future-Ready Tax Function — Where Direct Tax, Indirect Tax & AI Converge

34 📖 AI-Enabled Tax Transformation Deloitte Global 20–25 min

35 🎥 VAT Snapshot: Navigating E-Invoicing Changes from Europe to Southeast Asia Sovos 30 min

36📖 AI-Powered Efficiency: Bloomberg Tax’s Technology Bloomberg Tax 6–8 min

Week total: 2 articles + 1 webinar · ~56–63 min

Month Three total: 9 articles + 4 webinars · ~245–288 min

*any cool content I’ve missed? please let me know.

A selection of open roles across tax tech vendors and tax advisory/consulting businesses who are involved in tax technology.

Use the column headers to sort, or the (new) search function and don’t forget to navigate all pages!

*I do this using an AI agent and due to the volume, I don’t check every link, so please let me know if any of these don’t work or have disappeared when you follow them.

✌ Last thoughts

Thanks again for reading! If you have any feedback, suggestions, want to contribute, share gossip or would like to work together in any way, email me here or hit the button below!

Nexus Tax Tech Issue 7: VAT Challengers

Nexus Tax Technology — Fri, 22 May 2026 11:03:28 GMT

TL;DR , 116 Jobs, 7 events, 5:09 hours of learning and VAT Market Assessment

❤Next at the Nexus: VAT Tech

OK so a few weeks ago some of you kindly responded to a survey on here and LinkedIn regarding which way you’d like the research to go. Sadly the responses were tied 3 ways between European VAT providers, US AI based sales tax and direct tax providers, so I made the decision to follow what I think the bulk of my followers (right now) would be interested in which is the VAT market, I’ll get to the others I promise!!

Otherwise it’s been a slow news week for me, I guess everyone’s busy attending conferences… so time to introduce “the challengers” ✌

🧨Europe VAT Market Landscape and Challengers

If we want to understand the VAT technology vendors better, first we need to understand the landscape they’re playing in, because - like VAT and everything else in Europe (!) - it’s not that simple:

The platform story isn’t the endgame
The customer segments and ICP’s aren’t consistent
The origin stories of the vendors are very different

For me that means the old rules don’t apply, we need a news lense, new rubrics and new criterea for this, which means we need to learn something new, perfect!

Sizing the European VAT Technology Market
First stop is understanding the addressable market. The market-size debate usually starts with two camps: one says indirect tax tech is a fairly focused compliance niche, the other says it is really a broader automation layer sitting inside the oCFO tech stack.

The first camp tends to anchor on a core Europe VAT number like the $4Bn market view (proportional to an overal $14Bn Global TAM), while the second points to much larger global tax-management or tax-tech estimates that include e-invoicing, CTC, reporting, workflow, and adjacent automation. As we’re not a VC firm or Mckinsey, it’s largely academic, so let’s use the conservative figure of $4Bn (EUR 3.44Bn)

Estimating Market Share
Over the last few weeks we’ve profiled the largest players in the market, and helpfully estimated their revenues by product, which is a useful proxy for regional revenue. This is somewhat complicated by the dynamic of where the customer sits - and where the revenue is counted - vs where the obligation being solved is, via specific product/s, but some of this is a wash so we’ll keep it simple(ish) and directional for now.

Using the data previously collected in the vendor profiles and honing in on a subset of calculation revenues, reporting, CTC and managed services products lines, we could infer the revenues as being something like the table below.

Taking the mid point of those gives us a vended market penetration of around $687M (EUR 590M) or around 17% penetration.

Given that most of these companies have been operating in Europe for 15 years or so, with significant investment and north american customers/revenues you might be taken to wonder why the share isn’t greater. For that we need to look at the customer segments….

Analysing the Customer Segments

The market in Europe is much more fragmented, given that calculating tax rates isn’t the core challenge and cross border tends to be the antagonist for VAT complexity. So let’s take a look at some customer archetypes:

Digital businesses usually want the lowest-friction product: API-first, fast implementation, and minimal finance-team drag. They are often more tolerant of a narrower feature set if the product fits modern billing, subscription, and platform workflows.
Marketplace sellers care less about enterprise governance and more about speed, self-serve setup, and whether the tool understands platform-led selling. They often need enough compliance to stay out of trouble, but not the full heavyweight stack.
Cross-border e-commerce buyers are more demanding than digital-only firms because VAT complexity rises sharply with geography. They tend to value jurisdiction coverage, e-commerce integrations, and clear handling of OSS/IOSS or equivalent cross-border rules.
Multinational enterprise finance teams are the classic enterprise tax-tech buyer: they want control, coverage, auditability, and ERP depth. They usually care less about slick UX than about reliability, governance, and support quality.
Accounting/tax service-led clients often buy around workflow, not just software. They want tools that make it easier for an external adviser or internal compliance team to manage multiple clients, multiple filings, and multiple jurisdictions efficiently.
Hybrid managed-service buyers are typically less interested in pure software elegance and more interested in whether the vendor can take work off their plate. This segment will often pay for support, managed operations, and outcomes rather than standalone product purity.

Sizing the Segments

The biggest share goes to multinational enterprise finance teams because they buy the broadest stacks, need the deepest integrations, and tolerate the longest implementations; that is where the highest ACVs and most durable renewals sit. Cross-border e-commerce comes next because it is both structurally fragmented and high growth, but average deal sizes are usually smaller than large enterprise finance deployments.

The lighter segments — digital businesses and marketplace sellers — are numerically broad but usually buy simpler, lower-price tools, so they take less of the TAM than their user counts would suggest. Accounting/tax service-led clients and hybrid managed-service buyers sit in the middle: they can be sticky and operationally valuable, but the spend is split between software and service, which caps pure software TAM share.

Looking at Deployment Options
The deployment stack in this market runs from heavy enterprise software to very light self-serve tools, and the differences matter a lot. At the top end you have cloud/SaaS and on-premise platforms for multinational finance teams, where the product is deeply integrated into ERP and compliance workflows; then there are software-plus-managed-services models, where the vendor does part of the compliance work as well as providing the software; and at the lighter end you get calculator-style utilities and marketplace/self-serve products built for speed, simplicity, and lower admin overhead.

The practical takeaway is simple: deployment model is often a better buying signal than feature list. If a vendor is software-only, the buyer is usually buying control and integration depth; if it is software plus managed services, the buyer is buying relief and operational coverage; if it is a lightweight utility, the buyer is usually a digital business or marketplace seller that wants compliance without enterprise baggage. That is why the same “VAT compliance” label can hide very different commercial motions and very different fit for tax, finance, and e-commerce teams

The five main delivery models identified are:

Software-only — pure product, buyer owns all implementation, configuration, and ongoing operations
Software + managed services — product plus a vendor-led service wrap covering filings, compliance operations, or ongoing support
Managed services-led with software enablement — the service is the primary commercial offer, software sits underneath as the delivery mechanism rather than the sellable product
Marketplace / self-serve product — low-friction, self-onboarding model, typically lower ACV, built for speed and simplicity over depth and governance
Calculator / lightweight utility — narrow single-function tools such as VAT rate lookup or basic tax determination, often embedded, white-labelled, or API-called rather than deployed as a standalone platform

Grouping the Vendors

These vendors split somewhat neatly into three camps* Fonoa is the purest product-led play, with a single-platform, API-first model for tax ID validation, calculation, e-invoicing, and returns; Quaderno and Vatcalc sit at the lighter end of the spectrum, with self-serve or utility-style offers aimed at lightweight VAT calculation and filing use cases.

On the other side, Marosa, Fintua, Taxually, and AVASK are more hybrid or service-augmented, pairing software with consulting, filings, registrations, or operational support. Lovat sits in the middle as a broader compliance platform with e-commerce and multi-country coverage.

*note that for now I’m excluding SAP Add-ons and eInvoice vendors, as IMO they have their own segment views.

Next Step: Reframing the Evaluation Methodology

So for now my work involves rewriting the evaluation critera to take into account these new factors, which will keep me busy through the next week for sure. Once that’s done, we’ll start to look at the individual vendors/solutions.

Until then, stay tuned for more and please feel free to give feedback. If you have a viewpoint on the market or the work I’m doing, I’d love to speak with you, drop me a line below.

A selection of of opportunities to connect in person and interact online over the next few weeks

May 2026

Gartner Finance Symposium/Xpo™ 2026 (In-Person)
Vertex Inc | May 27–29, 2026 | Gaylord National Resort, National Harbor, MD, USA
Finance leaders forum with Vertex providing practical strategies on indirect tax compliance within the enterprise technology ecosystem.
Register →

What to Expect from Global Tax Policy and Controversy in 2026 (Webinar)
EY | May 28, 2026 | Online/Virtual
A panel of EY Tax Policy and Controversy leaders discusses strategic priorities for tax departments as they address changing global tax policy and enforcement landscapes.
Register →

June 2026

*any organisers or events I’ve missed? please let me know.

A curated selection of blogs, white-papers and on demand content published by multiple organisartions across the landscape, organised into a themed learning path.

MONTH TWO · MAY 2026

E-Invoicing, CTCs & Real-Time Compliance

Belgium is now live, Brazil is overhauling its entire indirect tax system, Poland’s KSeF mandate is entering enforcement, and France’s September 2026 deadline is approaching. The e-invoicing landscape has never moved faster.

Week 8 · 26–30 May

Intelligence & Emerging Markets: SYNAPSE Insights, Brazil’s Reform & AI in Indirect Tax

22 📖 5 Key Indirect Tax Trends from SYNAPSE 2026 Fonoa 10–12 min

23 📖 Brazil 2026 Tax Reform: Key E-Invoicing Changes for Businesses Fonoa 10–12 min

24 🎥 Embracing the Future of Tax Compliance with AI Avalara 45–60 min

Week total: 2 articles + 1 webinar · ~65–84 min

MONTH THREE · JUNE–JULY 2026

Direct Tax, Pillar Two & Corporate Tax Provision

Week 9 · 2–6 June

Pillar Two 2026: The Side-by-Side Package and What It Means for Technology

25 📖 QDMTT: Stay Ahead of the Global Minimum Tax Curve Orbitax (TR) 12–15 min

26 📖 OECD Side-by-Side Package: Relief for US Multinationals RSM US 12–15 min

27 🎥 Pillar Two Compliance: Grant Thornton & Orbitax Strategies Orbitax / Grant Thornton 60 min · CPE

Week total: 2 articles + 1 webinar · ~84–90 min

Week 10 · 9–13 June

Unpacking the Side-by-Side Package & the First GIR Filing Cycle

28 📖 The New Pillar Two Framework: Unboxing the Side-by-Side Package Alvarez & Marsal 15–18 min

29 📖 2026 Indirect Tax Trends Vertex Inc. 8–10 min

30 🎥 Seamless Tax Data Integration: From Any System to Pillar Two Compliance Orbitax / Deloitte 45–60 min

Week total: 2 articles + 1 webinar · ~68–88 min

Week 11 · 16–20 June

BEPS, Transfer Pricing & the Broader Global Reform Landscape

31 📖 Bloomberg Tax Leadership Forum 2025: Global Tax Reform — Are We There Yet? Bloomberg Tax 15–20 min

32 📖 Practical Advice for Managing Pillar Two: Global Minimum Tax Technology BDO / Thomson Reuters 10–12 min

33📖How to Build a Winning Indirect Tax Maturity Roadmap Fonoa 12–15 min

Week total: 3 articles · ~37–47 min

Month Two/Three total: 9 articles + 3 webinars · ~254–309 min

*any cool content I’ve missed? please let me know.

A selection of open roles across tax tech vendors and tax advisory/consulting businesses who are involved in tax technology.

Use the column headers to sort, or the (new) search function and don’t forget to navigate all pages!

*I do this using an AI agent and due to the volume, I don’t check every link, so please let me know if any of these don’t work or have disappeared when you follow them.

✌ Last thoughts

Thanks again for reading! If you have any feedback, suggestions, want to contribute, share gossip or would like to work together in any way, email me here or hit the button below!

The Nexus - tax technology market insights

The Nexus Issue 26: Taxmarc

Q4 taxtech hiring update

Follow the requisitions

🌍 Vendor Spotlight: Taxmarc

The SAP-Native VAT Engine PwC Handed Back

OCTOBER 2026

NOVEMBER 2026

MONTH — OCTOBER 2026

Market Consolidation, Live Mandates, Post-Filing Pillar Two & Synthesis

Week 1 · 5–10 October

Week 2 · 12–17 October

Week 3 · 19–24 October

Week 4 · 26–31 October (Capstone)

Programme Summary

September total: 20 articles + 6 webinars = 26 resources · ~532–615 min (~8.5–10 hrs)

Want to go deeper? Let’s chat

The Nexus Issue 25: Interview with Alphatax

The Sales Tax Arms Race Heats Up

🌍 Feature: The Nexus on this week’s Tax, Tech and Other Stuff Podcast Interview with Alphatax & Russell Gammon

Behind the E-Invoicing Noise: The Nexus’ View on Mandates, AI, and What Comes Next

Building The Nexus: From Research Project to Community

Why Is E-Invoicing So Busy? Lazy Marketing and a Real Regime

The UK’s 2029 Mandate: MTD All Over Again?

Tax Buys on Deadlines: What MTD and Pillar 2 Teach Us

AI in Practice: Agents, Research and the Carpenter’s Jig

Vendor AI: Co-Pilots Look Nice, MCP Moves the Needle

Warranty, Indemnity and the SaaSpocalypse

Who Wins? Incumbents, Start-Ups and a Fragmenting Market

Five Years Out: What Changes and What Doesn’t

SEPTEMBER 2026

OCTOBER 2026

SEPTEMBER 2026

E-Invoicing, Direct Tax, Pillar Two & Synthesis

Week 1 · 7–11 September

Week 2 · 14–18 September

Week 3 · 21–25 September

Week 4· 28 September – 2 October (Capstone)

September total: 20 articles + 6 webinars = 26 resources · ~532–615 min (~8.5–10 hrs)

Want to go deeper? Let’s chat

The Nexus Issue 24: E-Invoicing in the UAE

What’s happening in the latest IDC Marketscape report

🌍 Feature: Navigating the United Arab Emirates E-invoicing Vendor Lanscape Behind Every UAE ASP, Another ASP

The real segmentation isn’t six categories. It’s four tiers.

What each tier actually exposes you to

Two markets colliding inside one directory

The buyer’s decision sequence

Quick reference: navigating each category

The landing punch

SEPTEMBER 2026

OCTOBER 2026

SEPTEMBER 2026

E-Invoicing, Direct Tax, Pillar Two & Synthesis

Week 1 · 7–11 September

Week 2 · 14–18 September

Week 3 · 21–25 September

Week 4· 28 September – 2 October (Capstone)

September total: 20 articles + 6 webinars = 26 resources · ~532–615 min (~8.5–10 hrs)

Want to go deeper? Let’s chat

The Nexus Issue 23: Operator Interview with Uber Tax PM

The Nexus on Tour: TBM Group Indirect Tax Technology Summit

Two Conferences Happened in the Same Room

Vendor Narrative:

Customer Narrative:

Where They Complement

Where They Diverge

🗣️ Inside Uber’s Tax Stack: An interview with Diyan Mihaylov

A Product Manager’s View on Vendors, AI, and What Comes Next

Product Manager vs. Tax Technology Manager

Thinking in Flows, Not Tools

Where Vendors Earn Their Keep — and Where They Fall Short

The UX Debate: Will Agents Replace the Reporting Interface?

Can Any Vendor Own the Tax Data Layer?

What AI Is Actually Doing in Tax Right Now

Where This Goes Next

Advice for Building a Career in Tax Tech

SEPTEMBER 2026

OCTOBER 2026

SEPTEMBER 2026

E-Invoicing, Direct Tax, Pillar Two & Synthesis

🌍 Feature: Navigating the United Arab Emirates E-invoicing Vendor Lanscape

Behind Every UAE ASP, Another ASP