Sales and use tax errors are costing most companies an exponential amount of money every year. As such, it’s critical to maintain a defined and repeatable process to get things right.  This includes regularly auditing the source data going to your engine, as well as regularly auditing the results coming back from your engine. 

For those somewhat new to sales tax automation and/or thinking about leveraging it going forward, there are many other topics you should consider before adopting your ultimate solution.  Below are a few that come to mind, along with how our solution can help with each.

1. Implementation: When working in various systems, the setup can often take months or even years to complete. Long implementation processes can be frustrating and hinder performance. With TaxView Pro, our implementation process is efficient and timely. Most clients are up and running in just two months.

2. Configuration: Tax rules, regulations, and rates are constantly changing. When configuring and customizing rules, it is important to build rules that fit for your business, are simple to understand, and yield an accurate result.  With TaxView, the rules are easily configurable and can change with your business and associated tax laws.

3. Visibility: Your automation must contain robust reporting to ensure accuracy.  Additionally, it’s good to adopt and adhere to reviewing your source data and results on a monthly cadence. Often, looking at data can be complex and take long periods of time. Using TaxView provides granular visibility into all transactions and gives the ability to review them quickly. Gone are the days where data is too complex to comprehend or too difficult to organize.

4. Accuracy and Efficiency: Inaccurate and/or omitted data is the number one cause of sales and use tax errors. Not to mention, it makes the process completely inefficient. With TaxView Pro, we have various ways to identify and fix all associated tax errors in a simple and efficient manner.  Furthermore, we guarantee all of our results with our Zero Fee Guarantee.

How much are sales and use tax errors costing you? For most companies the answer is shocking. Tax over and under payments for non-compliance can easily cost companies hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars each year. Ideal for complicated tax requirements, TaxView Pro brings clarity and huge savings to your sales and use tax function. Our turnkey solution is configured at a granular level with all applicable tax rules for your business to calculate the most accurate tax possible. To see more benefits, click the link below.

Thank you for joining us on our blog series! The tenth and final best practice for procurement-side tax automation is develop multidimensional reporting.

Automation without proper reporting is like cooking a meal you never taste - there’s no way to tell if it’s any good. If you truly want to be successful with your tax automation efforts, you must develop and regularly utilize good, multidimensional reporting.   

Reporting should be the backbone of all automation. Not just so you can ensure your intended results are being captured, but also to allow you to examine, digest, and react to any nuances that may become visible in the data. Before developing your reporting, it’s extremely important to audit, understand, and question all source data. Doing so will help you better understand what types of reports can be generated, as well as what data elements are available to drive your intended result.

For example, when we develop new reports for our applications, we always work backwards. That is, we start our analysis asking the question of what we hope to achieve by the report. Once determined, we then question what data elements would be required to substantiate our findings.  From there, we ensure those data elements exist within the source data. If not, we work to change the source data to include the necessary information and/or assess if other existing data elements could work as a viable substitute.

Once comfortable the data exists to generate our report, we then move on to the “action” of running the report. This deals with the applicable report parameters a user may want to utilize in running the report (e.g., date ranges, company codes, general ledger accounts, etc.), essentially any way the user may want to customize the report for their particular audience.

Next, we focus on the design and layout, both for on screen and extract purposes. If your report generates a substantial amount of tedious detail, it’s usually best to make only the main data values visible on the screen. This often helps the user quickly digest the information and determine if an extract, with more data values, should be generated.

The last step of our process usually deals with the need for drill capabilities, essentially asking the question if the existing report should drive another report. Drill reports, as we like to call them, are a great way to help the user digest complex, multidimensional information. Rather than trying to compile and display a bunch of detail into just one report, a drill report can allow you to provide summary information that “drills” into a separate detailed report based upon a key characteristic within the summary report.

As you can see, many steps are often involved to ensure your reporting needs are met for your automation. Failure to take the time to methodically go through each step may only be slightly better than having no reports whatsoever. However, when done correctly, reporting can typically bring to light many aspects within the data that were previously unknown or even represent a potential liability to the organization. That’s why we believe it should be the backbone of your automation efforts.

Our blog series is winding down. Tip number 9, Scan Source Documents, is this weeks topic. Stayed tuned for next week when tell you our tenth and final best practice. 

Most third-party tax engines today come with some sort of delivered taxability content, which is why blog number eight, geared towards performing routine taxability reviews is one of our top 10 best practices.

Checking your tax accrual process for accuracy is something that every company needs to make a habit and that is why blog number 7 is crucial for your success.

Performing periodic vendor reviews is a great way for tax departments to mitigate audit surprises and increase their value within the organization. The frequency for these reviews can vary, based on the size of the organization, the complexity of the industry, the integrity of the procurement data, and the number of vendors regularly used for purchases. However, they should generally be performed at least once or twice a year.

Our last blog showcased line detail over invoice summary and how that line detail information can really save the day. This blog talks about the importance of providing flexibility for different transactions like situsing and allocations. 

We are half-way through our blog series and line detail over invoice summary is this week's topic.