Tax Performance Engineering
Client Success Story
The tax department at a large
multinational organization used manual
processes and rudimentary technology to
generate standard input templates for controllers
of 300+ business units. These templates allow the controllers to allocate costs associated with intercompany sales in order to compute operating margin for transfer pricing compliance.
Background
Company Issues
Technology Issues
The original process ran end-to-end using a series of inputs from a consolidation software tool and iterative, macro-enabled workbooks.
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A review of the company’s existing processes identified many issues. The company had also reached the limits of their legacy macro-enabled workbooks. Left unchecked, the company was exposed to substantial risk.
Data Issues
All inputs came from the consolidation software in a relatively consistent format; however, identifying new accounts, new plants and new intercompany trading partners was extremely manual and tedious. Due to performance issues, the company passed on processing historically immaterial plants in order to shorten processing time.
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Process Issues
After manually identifying and mapping new accounts, plants and intercompany trading partners, the master template that governed the format and formulas for 300+ templates required an update to include these new items.
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Workforce Issues
This process was architected and operated by a single individual, a third-party consultant. It took two days to run this process end-to-end.
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Company Benefits
The tax department was fully engaged during the development and implementation. After a successful launch, the company has full ownership of the redesigned process.
The client independently runs and maintains the solution end-to-end with zero reliance on BDO or the third-party consultant.
Processing time that once took two days for a sophisticated user to complete is now accomplished in under one hour.
By leveraging analytics process automation (APA), processing speed is no longer a limitation, and the company can now include all entities regardless of size.
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