Success Story · Large-Taxpayer Manufacturing Group

Meeting a National Tax Deadline Without Slowing the Business Down

Facing a hard national e-invoicing mandate across five large-taxpayer entities, a manufacturing group chose a standard SAP-based compliance path, delivered both outbound and inbound e-invoicing under real deadline pressure, and had the result independently validated before a single invoice went live.

The Challenge

When Nigeria's tax authority mandated real-time e-invoicing for large taxpayers, the stakes were not administrative, they were financial. Under the mandate, an invoice that is not validated and transmitted through the government's platform cannot support a Value Added Tax (VAT) input credit claim. For a group with five entities classified as large taxpayers, that meant five separate implementations, a hard compliance deadline, and a regulator that changed its own data requirements mid-programme.

The group faced a genuine strategic choice: build a custom integration from scratch, or adopt a standard SAP-delivered compliance solution. Get this decision wrong, in either direction, over-engineer it or under-scope it, and the business risks either blown timelines or blown compliance.

How Newen Helped

Newen ran a rapid, structured evaluation of build-versus-buy options and recommended the standard SAP Document and Reporting Compliance path, then led delivery across all five entities: solution design, data readiness (including the unglamorous but critical work of validating tax identification numbers across the active customer base), integration build, and testing. When the tax authority issued unannounced changes to its invoice data schema partway through the programme, forcing rework against an already tight deadline, the team absorbed the change and kept moving rather than requesting a deadline extension.

Critically, the programme did not mark its own homework. An independent Big Four advisory firm ran a full functional, integration and user-acceptance quality assurance review before go-live, testing every invoicing scenario the business actually uses, standard sales, credit notes, debit notes, rebates, asset and scrap sales, and confirming all of the tax authority's mandatory data fields were correctly configured. With outbound compliance secured, the team carried the same solution design and QA discipline into a fast-follow phase covering inbound e-invoicing, automating the accounts payable side of the same mandate rather than leaving it as a manual gap.

The Results

Outbound e-invoicing went live across the group, and adoption did not just happen, it grew: invoice volume climbed past 7,000 in the first weeks live and beyond 11,000 within the following quarter, spread across all five entities. The independent quality assurance review's verdict was unambiguous: the solution was delivered on time and within scope, with all critical issues resolved before go-live, and stable, favourably received performance in production. Inbound e-invoicing, automating the accounts payable side of the same mandate, has since been delivered and is now live in production, extending the same compliant, independently validated foundation across the group's full invoicing lifecycle rather than stopping at the deadline-driven outbound requirement.