By George Demetriou
Last February we launched Positive Veritas, an innovative online platform that hosts the entirety of the Cyprus Tax and makes it easily accessible and searchable to professionals. In a stroke of bad luck, we launched just before the onset of COVID 19 in Cyprus. One year on, we can unequivocally say that even under these unfortunate circumstances, Veritas has demonstrated its utility and value, having been embraced by government agencies, the large accounting and tax firms in Cyprus and a much wider array of smaller practices.
What is Veritas?
Information about Cyprus Tax is scattered around websites and documents not easily searchable. Worse yet, there is no way that anyone can search all the different documents and platforms concurrently. So, each search is limited to the repository at hand (assuming search facilities exist, which is not always the case), therefore limiting its usefulness for the purposes of comprehensive research.
By contrast, the capability to search disparate and vastly differentiated databases with precision lies at the core of Veritas’ value proposition. At a keystroke users can search the all available tax documents, or a subset thereof, from a single search bar and in mere milliseconds. A “Google” for Cyprus Tax, fulfilling the need for a fast, yet comprehensive research of tax issues.
Positive Veritas is the culmination of two and a half years of software engineering, data processing and integration by a dedicated team of professionals. It is true to say that there is no comparable tool available in Cyprus and even in some larger international markets. Portable and flexible it allows work from anywhere on a desktop or laptop, tablet or smartphone.
Developments in tax are continuous. Legislation is revised frequently, and it’s essential for the professional to stay updated. To democratize access to these changes, we introduced weekly emails of summarized changes and relevant Veritas links, shared across LinkedIn.
Our journey
Four stages feature in our journey:
Firstly, by launching Veritas we were mindful that we launched Positive Group into a new era of digital offerings. Five years of background developments in proprietary technology which would enable us to develop state-of-the-art enterprise platforms had come to fruition. Veritas was a milestone, but also a new beginning. These investments are fundamental to our vision of Positive’s evolution into a tech company; we believe that the results of our R&D allow us to deliver immensely powerful solutions with a level of quality, reliability, security and velocity that is many years ahead of many domestic and international players. In 2021 we expect new offerings and the start of some ambitious projects.
Secondly, we were able to give tax and accounting professionals a key tool to carry out research without worrying about incomplete or outdated information.
Thirdly, whilst we had a minimum viable product at launch, we expected that it would undergo enhancements over the following months. We presented the service and listened to user feedback, even with COVID restrictions limiting audience reach, leading to three significant enhancements: automated translation, complex search tools and more frequent updates.
Finally, we realized that Veritas, a platform of hosting and searching any type of document has other applications. Multiple libraries of documents with access controlled at user level, potentially make Veritas a knowledge base tool.
Our objective was to establish Veritas as the primary tax research tool among practitioners. Signs are that we are almost there. To the many people who have trusted us we extend a warm thank you.
To learn more about Veritas, please visit https://veritas.positive.cy/.
