Most retailers and POS vendors still talk about fiscalization the way people talk about bad weather. It is something you have to live with, something that slows you down, something that ruins your best-laid plans for new concepts and international expansion. After almost three decades in retail technology, working with large chains and POS software vendors across dozens of markets, I came to a different conclusion: fiscalization and compliance can become a competitive advantage—if you treat them with the same seriousness and creativity as you treat your core business model.
That conviction led me to write The Fiscalization Compliance Maturity Model, a 450-page framework for retailers and POS specialists who are tired of firefighting and want to put structure, metrics and strategy behind their compliance work. The book is not a theoretical essay. It is a synthesis of successful projects and painful failures, distilled into a model that allows you to assess where you are today, understand why you experience the problems you have, and design a realistic path to something much better.
A Simple Store Scene that Explains Everything
I often start with a simple scene. Imagine a fashion retailer with a wide international footprint. On a rainy day in a complex fiscal country, a customer walks into one of its flagship stores and uses a kiosk to find a product. The kiosk allows the customer to pay by card on the spot, while the merchandise is shipped from a central warehouse and delivered the next day. The process is clean, efficient and, most importantly, compliant.
Now imagine a clever business manager asks an obvious question: why not let the customer take the item directly from the shelf if it is already available in the store? It is a small process change with a big promise. The customer leaves happy, logistics costs fall, delivery times vanish. In many organizations, that decision can be made in seconds. And in many fiscal countries, that tiny change—if not reflected in the underlying fiscal processes and systems—immediately makes the transaction illegal.
Compliance as the Hidden Bottleneck in Global Retail
This is the everyday reality I wrote the book for. Retailers operate under enormous pressure. Margins are under attack. Competitors cross borders faster than ever. New formats, from social and live commerce to experimental store concepts, appear almost weekly. At the same time, legal landscapes in key markets are becoming more complex, not less. In Europe alone, the majority of countries are already fiscal, with many of them tightening rules, and e-invoicing is spreading with firm deadlines between now and 2027. Every new country and every new concept adds another layer of law, regulation and ambiguity.
In that environment, compliance has quietly become a bottleneck. You cannot open a store in France, Italy or Brazil today without thinking about fiscalization, e-invoicing and related requirements. You cannot roll out live shopping or a new omnichannel flow without asking whether the tax authorities will see those flows as compliant. Most organizations know this instinctively, but they have no language and no framework for turning that awareness into a structured capability.
The Fiscalization Compliance Maturity Model
The core of my book is a maturity model with four distinct levels that I see again and again in practice. Over the years I have been told countless times that “our company is unique” and “our processes are different.” To some extent that is always true. But once you look closely at how companies handle POS requirements and fiscalization, patterns emerge very clearly.
At the lowest level are organizations that only react. They have no defined processes or clear ownership for fiscalization. Requirements arrive from somewhere—the board, a country manager, a local partner, a change in the law—and teams scramble to respond. There is little or no internal documentation, and very few people beyond a small technical or legal group truly understand what fiscalization means. Awareness is low, training is ad hoc, and responsibility is pushed to local suppliers. These companies are permanently in firefighting mode.
The second level is what I call the fragmented mode. Here, companies have begun to invest in compliance teams, but in the form of isolated islands. A global POS vendor might have one team handling France and another handling the United Kingdom, each with its own country versions, documentation and suppliers, even when they serve the same retailers in the same additional markets. Large retailers behave similarly, with regional structures that reinvent solutions independently. Effort, cost and knowledge are duplicated. Complexity grows with every new country, and maintenance becomes a nightmare.
On the third level, organizations start connecting these islands. They recognize the waste and risk of fragmentation and begin building common processes and architectures that can be shared across markets. Compliance becomes part of standard operations rather than an emergency exercise. There is usually a central person or team responsible for compliance and fiscalization. Documentation is standardized and shared. Monitoring of legal changes is no longer left solely to local partners; it is coordinated and proactive. These companies are not yet perfect, but they are clearly on the path from chaos to control.
The fourth level is rare, but it exists. Here, compliance and fiscalization are fully embedded in business and technology strategy. Leadership no longer sees fiscal countries as an unfortunate illness, but as a field where they can outpace rivals. Architecture decisions for POS, middleware and back-office systems are made with fiscal requirements in mind from the very beginning. Research and development budgets include compliance topics alongside flashy new sales features. These companies innovate not only in customer experience, but in how they implement, operate and maintain fiscalization. As a result, they open new markets faster, adapt to law changes more smoothly, and carry less risk than their competitors.
Climbing the Levels: From Firefighting to Control
The book walks through each level in detail, describing typical symptoms, strengths and weaknesses, and then lays out concrete steps for moving upward. It does not pretend that every organization must reach level four. Some might decide that a well-managed level three is optimal for their size and footprint. But it makes clear that staying in level one or two is increasingly dangerous and expensive in a world where compliance requirements are proliferating.
Building a Shared Understanding of Fiscalization
Around this maturity model I built a broader framework. The first chapters explain fiscalization itself in accessible technical depth: what it is, which models exist in different countries, how security mechanisms and algorithms work, and what software and middleware concepts are commonly used to implement it. The goal is to give everyone who touches the topic—from product managers and architects to project leads and senior executives—a shared understanding of the landscape rather than a scattered collection of country myths.
Checklists, KPIs and Other Practical Tools
The book then introduces a set of tools that I have found indispensable in real projects. One of them is a series of seven detailed checklists. They cover questions such as how to assess whether a POS vendor is mature enough in fiscalization for your needs, how to evaluate a fiscal solution provider, and how to plan a rollout so that you do not overlook “small” but critical details, like the service book that must physically sit next to a fiscal printer in a certain market. These checklists are not academic; they are born from projects in which such details were overlooked and cost time, money and nerves.
Another tool is the definition of key performance indicators for compliance projects. In many organizations, the only measure of success is whether the store opened on time and whether the system is technically compliant. That is not enough. If you want to improve, you need numbers that show where you lose time, where you spend too much money, and where risks accumulate. In the book I define separate sets of KPIs for retailers and POS vendors, because their priorities differ, and I show how these metrics can be used to identify weak points in processes and architectures.
Putting a Price on Compliance: Rethinking ROI
I also propose a way to think about return on investment in compliance. Measuring ROI in this area is notoriously difficult; in many cases, the “benefit” is simply that nothing bad happens. Still, I am convinced it is possible to build a reasonable model. The book offers a formula and examples—not as a dogma, but as inspiration to construct your own ROI logic that fits your organization. Even an approximate view of how better fiscalization reduces project delays, incident volumes or penalties can transform internal conversations about budgets and priorities.
Seeing the World: Country Profiles as Strategic Tool
To support a more strategic view, the book includes high-level profiles of twenty-five fiscal countries. These overviews are not meant to replace detailed legal analysis; they will not give you every field to program in your POS. What they do provide is enough understanding to compare markets, see patterns, and organize your software development and rollout strategy intelligently. When you grasp how different fiscal approaches cluster, you can design architectures and processes that are reusable across groups of countries rather than reinvented for each one.
A Roadmap for Change
Finally, the book concludes with what I describe as a roadmap, although it is more accurately a structured list of recommended steps. It shows how to use the maturity model, checklists, KPIs and country overviews together to move from a reactive posture to a strategic one. It suggests how to assign ownership, how to build governance, how to integrate compliance reviews into your standard project flow, and how to use the material to onboard new colleagues. One of the most practical benefits we have seen in our own organization is a significant reduction in the time it takes new team members to become productive in fiscalization projects.
Why This Matters Now
If you are a retailer or POS specialist, you probably recognize yourself somewhere in these descriptions. Perhaps you spend your days putting out fires when laws change. Perhaps you maintain multiple local versions of your software that no one fully understands anymore. Perhaps you have ambitious plans for new formats or markets, but you are held back by the uncertainty of what compliance will demand.
My book is written for exactly that reality. It does not promise a world without fiscalization. It does not suggest that compliance will ever be effortless. What it offers is a way to see the problem clearly, to classify your current approach honestly, and to build the structures that allow you to move faster with less risk. In a world where almost every retailer can copy the same sales features and store concepts, the ability to master fiscalization and compliance may well be one of the quietest, but most decisive, competitive advantages you can build.
‘The Fiscalisation Compliance Maturity Model’ is available worldwide on Amazon.