The ambition of today’s tax department is to become a trusted advisor to the rest of the organization, contributing to strategic value and becoming more closely aligned with the business, while adapting to the challenges of real-time tax.

However, in practice, many tax departments are still spending the majority of their time on compliance, especially tax returns and financial reporting. In order to achieve the vision of adding value through joint ventures in business, the tax function needs to free up more time for personnel to move up the value chain – but how?

Put simply, tax functions can achieve this by implementing a robust data and technology strategy that includes the effective deployment of tax technologies to manage the acquisition and flow of data, automate repetitive and manual tasks, and enable informed strategic decisions and improved performance. This can be summarized in three pillars:

1. Data and information
   The key to overall improvement starts here – in understanding where your data resides and how it is generated. You can then explore how the data can be captured digitally and mined to better enable tax software, computations and processes to drive efficiencies, reduce risk, and derive value-adding insight.
2. Automation 
   Armed with oversight and control of your data, you can start to evaluate and deploy technology to automate repetitive and manual tasks using robotic process automation. As well as freeing up time to focus on value-add-ing activities, automation can improve quality by eliminating manual errors, increase efficiency by reducing costs, and improve governance by lowering compliance risk.
3. Decision support and stakeholder value creation 
   The effective deployment of tax software and supporting tools is also essential to the effective management of tax and statutory obligations, and the key to releasing resources from compliance and validation activity to more effective management of risks. With the right software and tools, including workflow and data management platforms, you have the opportunity to streamline compliance activities and harness all the management information you need to identify tax risks and be a trusted advisor to the business.

Through the combination of these three pillars, the tax function will have the crucial agility to react in an evolving landscape of tax compliance and reporting, which cannot be achieved through single-point solutions.

• Are you getting the tax data you need from your organization’s ERP system? 
• Have you implemented or considered implementing automation technology? 
• Are you aware of the various tax technology solutions available?