Tax Automation & Innovation

Elevate your tax department from reactive to proactive

Reimagine your tax function from data to deliverable

Corporate tax departments face a constant stream of new and evolving demands, from ever-increasing regulatory and reporting requirements to the need for improved speed and total tax transparency.

How to meet this mandate? Tax departments must leverage technology — both existing and emerging — to accelerate data-driven insights, improve reporting and ensure regulatory compliance. 

BDO works with companies to design and document processes, extract, transform and load source data, automate tax calculations and streamline tax reporting. Our Tax Automation & Innovation team brings real-world experience and extensive technical knowledge to help your tax department realize the benefits of innovation.  

We provide a process and technology roadmap — paired with robust training and ongoing guidance — to help your team manage complexity and avoid adverse outcomes like noncompliance or missed tax benefits.

How BDO Can Help

Delivering Innovation Across the Tax Lifecycle

We work with clients to optimize the entire data-to-deliverable spectrum, from data sources all the way to final reports.


Data

Gathered from source systems, such as ERP, general ledger, fixed assets, inventory, human resources, sales, purchases, data providers, data lakes, and databases.


Data Engineering

Data modeling, robotic process automation, analytics process automation, master data management, reconciliation, and other technologies deployed based on business need.


Tax Engines

Tax system implementation, configuration or optimization based on selected tax software, including tax provision, income tax, indirect tax, transfer pricing, fixed assets, and more.

Deliverables

Outputs from tax systems and databases, including financial reporting, tax returns, estimated payments, transfer pricing inputs, stat reports, data visualizations, dashboards, and analytics.

Capabilities

We evaluate existing processes within your tax function and help you streamline performance through identification of manual processes and recommendation of best practice approaches to realize optimized tax reporting workflows and output, in balance with the risk mitigation goals of the organization.  

We assist with: 

  • Mapping all necessary data points within the tax lifecycle through from various source systems to deliverable(s) 
  • Identification of tax return and tax reporting efficiencies 
  • Automation and integration of provision and return processes for efficiency 
  • Configuration of flexible tax solutions & processes to meet business and regulatory requirements and changes, such as M&A activity or tax law updates 
  • Identification of continuous process improvement opportunities 
Develop a roadmap for a Fully Optimized Tax Function 
Take our Free Tax Process Assessment

We help your tax department gather, share and analyze tax data—speeding time-to-value, strengthening report quality and enabling your team to focus on higher-value strategic tasks. 

We work with businesses to: 

  • Review and analysis of current Finance Organization IT and data infrastructure (including data mapping via an initial Tax Process Assessment
  • Consult upon data requirements as a component of a broader ERP or financial consolidation system implementation 
  • Automate manual, repeatable tasks like data collection, PDF extraction and email generation using RPA technologies such as UiPath and Microsoft Power Automate 
  • Build tax data wrangling and data mining tools leveraging tools such as Alteryx to cleanse, join, and format raw tax data into usable datasets.  
  • Establish Master Data infrastructure and management strategy  
  • Create personalized tax dashboards for on-demand and accurate management reporting insights using Microsoft Power BI and Microsoft Power Apps or Tableau. 
  • Data analytics for forecasting, planning and real-time insights 

We help your team select, implement and deploy tax automation technology, including tax provision, compliance and indirect tax automation. 

We provide: 

  • Review and analysis of current processes 
  • Long-term technology roadmap development 
  • Software/vendor selection and assessment assistance (including solution demonstrations and scorecard comparisons between multiple potential tools) 
  • Implementation of process design 
  • Core implementation of tax technology selected including collaborative design, build, test and deploy steps along with agile project management throughout 
  • Customized training for users and system administrators 
  • Parallel run assistance post-implementation 
  • Ongoing support through “go-live” events and beyond 
  • Ongoing technology enhancement consultations (including support for software upgrades, structural business changes or new tax regulatory requirements) 


Our team has extensive experience both implementing and optimizing solutions from the major third-party tax software vendors: 

  • CSC Corptax Provision and Compliance tools 
  • Longview Provision, Analytics and Transfer Pricing 
  • Oracle Tax Reporting Cloud (TRCS) 
  • Thomson Reuters ONESOURCE Direct Tax Provision and Compliance tools (certified implementer), data and process management tools, ONESOURCE Indirect Tax solutions, including ONESOURCE Determination and ONESOURCE Sales & Use Tax 
  • Workiva Tax reporting platform including SEC reporting, transfer pricing, global statutory reporting and ESG 

We work with your tax department to streamline processes and automate manual tasks — strengthening and formalizing all workflows with documentation, standardization and increased process transparency. 

The benefits of maintaining process and technology documentation include: 

  • Cross-training and fewer key-person dependencies 
  • Reduced risk (internal control/external audit/regulatory risks) 
  • Streamlined hand-offs and review processes 
  • Increased transparency into tax lifecycle steps 

We provide the training and documentation to your team necessary to understand and confidently use new or existing technologies and processes. 

Our services include: 
  • Live or virtual customized training; CPE qualified upon request 
  • Customized technology user and administrator guides/checklists 
  • Collaborative, hands-on “lab style” trainings on tools such as Alteryx with the result being one or more co-built workflows 
  • Transition guidance 
  • Post-implementation support for ongoing system maintenance 

Free Tax Process Assessment

Transforming the tax function helps businesses recognize valuable time and cost-savings, make smarter decisions faster, and react and respond more quickly to new regulatory obligations and changing market forces. This is where BDO can help with a free Tax Process Assessment. 

Case Studies

2023 tax innovation webcast series logo

Join this five-part webcast series to explore technology applications across the tax function and gain real-world insight and best practices for implementing your next tax automation project.

Tax at the speed of tech podcast logo

Tune in to the podcast for insightful conversations with tax and technology leaders as they share their perspectives on reimagining the tax function to be more efficient, analytical, strategic and future-oriented.

Tax Automation & Innovation Insights

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Meet our Tax Automation & Innovation Leader

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