TOP 7 REASONS TO AUTOMATE YOUR TAX PROCESS

Before you explore our top seven reasons to automate, just consider for a minute if you’re facing any of these business challenges which have come about as a result of the changing regulatory landscape and its associated impact on corporation tax compliance. All of these challenges could be vastly reduced through a move to automation, so keep that in mind if any of these sound familiar to your business.

Increased workloads

The new wave of tax reporting regimes puts pressure on tax teams across the UK and Ireland. In the UK Making Tax Digital could result in a doubling of workloads where tax teams already spend 50-80% of their time on submissions. In Ireland PAYE modernisation is only the first step in a move towards increased real-time reporting across tax heads. This means that your skilled professionals and advisors are increasingly bogged down in administrative work and drawn away from performing strategic tasks.

Systems that don’t scale

With multiple data sources and formats across spreadsheets, accounting and ERP systems, the need for manual collection and re-working of data is causing organisations to struggle with systems that do not deliver an efficient end-to-end process.

Increased risk

Increased obligations, workloads and issues around data management will create increased risks for tax teams as a result of the authorities’ drive to close the tax gap. Risks include missed submissions dates, penalties, additional scrutiny from, and exposure to, the tax authorities and potential reputational damage.

Process Inefficiency

In this environment of ever-increasing workloads and tighter deadlines, an over-reliance on spreadsheets, poor collaboration and inefficient processes can only increase risk and put a strain on your already tight resources.

So how does automation allow you to address and overcome these challenges? Here are our top seven reasons to automate:

1. Better control – With immediate online access you’ll gain increased visibility of people, systems and processes to give you better control of the tax compliance lifecycle across your organisation. Imagine having companywide insight into hundreds or thousands of submissions, helping to mitigate risk and enhance productivity.
2. Ensure centralised management of risk – Automation can bring together all compliance reporting, workflow and productivity information and analytics through its interrogation of multiple systems and jurisdictions. Tax management and their teams can track at a glance where the organisation is in the submissions process, benchmarking who is doing the work and identifying those who are likely to provide information late. This way you can identify the level of risk to the organisation in real-time and gain insight into potential areas for operational efficiency improvement.
3. Visibility and cost savings from reduced human interaction – Manage, track and quality check end-to-end compliance processes which allows you to identify high-value tax savings across the organisation. With automation you can dispense with manual data collection for the preparation of annual computations, often carried out by skilled staff who could be better allocated to higher value-added activities. Human interaction increases the risk of error due to re-keying and copy-and-paste mistakes and opens the way for breaks in the audit trail.
4. Work more effectively with advisors – To meet accelerating demands, tax teams and advisors will need their existing systems and data processes to allow the processing of greater volumes of data into a range of reporting formats while keeping submissions accurate and consistent. Using tax technology creates time efficient processes both for tax teams and their advisors if it is integrated into the relationship, allowing tax professionals and advisors to concentrate on more strategic tax objectives.
5. Guarantee data accuracy across multiple entities – Have data automatically extracted from ERP and accounting systems and translated into standardised formats. The solution allows businesses to quickly and easily create efficient workflows by providing a centralised pot of data, saving significant time and costs which results in greater data accuracy across your tax reporting process, therefore reducing the risk of human error and allowing you to free up costly resources to focus on more critical business tasks. An automated system will provide better data management, audit and quality across the organisation, ensuring submissions are right first time.
6. Keep up to date with legislation – An automated system with built-in legislation helps to simplify an increasingly complex and demanding tax environment with tools that keep up to date with changes in the compliance and submissions process.
7. Audit trails and user-friendly reporting – An end-to-end solution takes raw data to create, calculate, review, convert and submit annual tax reporting in line with current tax authority rules, providing clear audit trails and generating user-friendly management reports while XML and iXBRL tagging formats support the relevant taxonomies.

If you’re at the point where you’re ready to embrace technology and automate your tax compliance processes –whether in part or end-to-end – you can read more here or just give us a call on 01784 777 700 or email us at enquiries@taxsystems.com.