How to inventory Epicor Kinetic's country-specific functionality, tax determination, and statutory reporting, and migrate each to D365's localisation layer — country/region configurations, the Tax Calculation service, Electronic Reporting, and Globalization Studio — including the discovery question of which countries are actually in scope and what requires an ISV.
Localisation is the layer of the system that a regulator — not a business owner — signs off. It covers country-specific tax calculation, statutory reporting formats, electronic invoice submission, trade reporting (Intrastat, EC Sales List), withholding tax, and any regulatory obligation that varies by jurisdiction.
Before any localisation design, the programme must answer a deceptively simple question: which countries does this Epicor system actually serve with a statutory obligation? The answer is not always obvious from the company list alone.
D365 ships localisation for a published list of countries. For each supported country, Microsoft provides:
Each Epicor Tax Type becomes a D365 sales tax code — carrying rate, method, and settlement period. Epicor Tax Liabilities decompose into D365 sales tax groups (on the customer/vendor) and item sales tax groups (on the product). The matrix intersection replaces Epicor's binding logic.
The Tax Calculation service is Microsoft's cloud-hosted tax-determination engine. It runs outside the D365 application and returns tax results via an API call for each transaction line. Key capabilities:
Electronic Reporting (ER) is D365's framework for generating formatted statutory outputs — VAT returns, statutory financial statements, e-invoice XML, Intrastat declarations, payment file formats, and any government-mandated document. ER configurations define:
E-invoicing is the fastest-growing regulatory obligation globally. Countries with live mandates include Italy, Mexico, India, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Poland, and an expanding list. Each mandate has its own:
For EU-based legal entities, D365 provides native Intrastat reporting — the statistical declaration of goods movements between EU member states. The configuration involves:
Much of Epicor's deep localisation and tax documentation sits behind the EpicWeb customer portal. During discovery, request the following from the client's Epicor administrator:
Localisation is the part of the migration a regulator signs off — and regulators do not accept "phase 2" as an answer. Every country-specific tax obligation, statutory report, and e-invoicing mandate must be operational from the first day of trading in D365.