Reverse implementation best practices?

A normal implementation is where you have a company with established processes and implement NAV for it. A reverse implementation is founding a new subsidiary: you already have NAV, so the new company will use it too, but they do not exist yet, no processes, no employees hired etc. how do you do an implementation in that stage?

I mean, imagine a very typical case, a sales office type subsidiary, selling in a foreign country. The starting "kit" is one person doing order processing the other doing accounting. You cannot just have them sit there and pay a salary for no work, so you have to do the implementation before you hire them. And you can assume there are no processes as such, simply you have to do the basic legal and minimal business requirements, the order processor must be able to issue invoices, book in receipts, check stock, the accountant book in purchase invoices and payments, make a balance sheet etc. but you have not hired them yet.

How do you deal with such a situation?

I did one such project that did not work too well. I started from the assumption that the most important thing you need to get right is taxes, VAT, because that carries the biggest fines. But my local NAV partner was unwilling to give me a standard typical VAT setup for that country, saying they can set up anything but we must say what, and my local tax advisor / auditor could give only the expected result but not the details. And I had no local accountant yet who would connect the two. I was pretty much pulling my hair out. I just wanted a basic locally acceptable setup so that when we hire an order processor and he starts firing invoices they are not wrong. ##

Similarly I needed a basic Chart of Accounts just to be able to get started posting invoices. Ask local NAV partner. They say everybody has a different one again our accountant has to tell them what we want. Aaargh we have no accountant yet. OK whatever, I googled around and found a local government approved Chart of Accounts. Imported. Made basic settings. Hired accountant. Turned out it was the wrong CoA that did not reflect recent legal changes, but of course he found that only after many postings were done so we could not just delete and import the other one. Aaargh.

In short it seems very hard to do a subsidiary implementation BEFORE local staff is hired. My question is, is this how you see it, basically just tell the management yes we have to pay people in the new subsidiary for a month or two without doing any sales while we do the implementation? Or find a better local partner who has a good basic preconfigured starter package? (Microsoft's isn't, I saw in the recent German VAT Setup there was not even EU Service set up separately.)