When it comes to finishing your financial close, do you ever think, there must be a better way? Jason Hamil, Sr. Tax Accounting Mgr, A Global Logistics & Transportation Company reveals, in the video below, four tips for getting ahead during year-end. Hear his year-end success story!

“Our biggest year-end challenges were being able to complete the financial close as quickly as we needed, as well as getting the quality of financial information used for tax compliance and analysis purposes.”

In late 2010, this global logistics and transportation company enlisted the help of ONESOURCE Income Tax as their primary tax compliance solution. At the same time, they were using ONESOURCE Tax Provision and had initiated a number of tax transformation initiatives, designed to take full advantage of the integration between the ONESOURCE return and provision solution on  a single platform.

“By pushing the federal return data into ONESOURCE Income Tax from ONESOURCE Tax Provision, we were able to complete our annual provision approximately one week or about 30% faster and we’re on track to accelerating our Federal and State compliance cycles by about 90 days over 3 years.”

Jason’s 4-Step Plan to Automating Tax Processes:

1. Think critically about the entire tax lifecycle: This includes the provision, your estimated payments, compliance and planning processes and focus on how the different functional responsibilities and the end of the line deliverables interact with each other.
2. Focus on the people and process improvements: And, let the tax technology create efficiency.
3. Build a consensus on change initiatives: Make sure that everyone’s a stakeholder and everyone’s on board.
4. Define a multi-year plan and re-evaluate that regularly: Communicate success and failures to everyone’s that involved so that they stay involved and are interested in and vested in the projects. (more…)

In case you missed any of  the first three success stories, check them out here. 

“I would say that ONESOURCE has helped to add consistency to our year-end process.“ –Andrea Smith,   Senior Tax Analyst, SES Americom Inc.

Andrea Smith, Senior Tax Analyst, SES Americom, Inc. explains in the video below how her tax department  initially had difficulty getting their provision done in a consolidated manner. After utilizing ONESOURCE, she was able to generate self-reconciling tax provision reports in real time, which allowed her to be confident in the accuracy of the reports needed for both her corporate headquarters in Luxembourg and auditors.

“The amount of money that we save in time spent just to get the basics done is huge and the secondary benefit is saving money during our audits. I think that we will have a much lower chance of making an error through the automation process and the fact that we have more time to analyze our trial balances is a big benefit.”

Andrea’s Year-End Best Practice Tip of the Day:

“Running Microsoft® Excel and ONESOURCE Tax Provision parallel gave me a great opportunity to double check myself. If my tax provision was not identical in the two models I had to investigate why there was a difference. 99% of the time it was either my mistake or a spreadsheet formula error.” (more…)

In case you missed the first two success stories, check them out here. 

Looking to free up time during your busiest season for more sleep, a vacation or to be with family more? Kim Gill, Sr. Tax Manager at Intermec shares (in the video below) how she’s spending her free time now that her tax department is experiencing significant time savings on their provision.

“Before we started using ONESOURCE Tax Provision, one of the biggest challenges that we faced was the big time crunch because the tax department is always the last one to get the data in. There’s always a big pressure to get the tax provision turned around as quickly as possible. Using an Excel-based provision, like we used before, made it very difficult for us to turn things around quickly.” – Kim Gill, Sr. Tax Manager, Intermec

Besides recently implementing ONESOURCE Tax Provision, this tax department has also upgraded their financial reporting system. This enabled them to have a single chart of accounts making it easier to import information into ONESOURCE Tax Provision.“ONESOURCE Tax Provision enabled us to turn deliverables around more quickly and analyze the data better. The software has also definitely helped us in improving our forecasting capabilities as it relates to taxes.”

Kim’s Year-End Best Practice Tip of the Day:

“I would recommend utilizing all of the available features of the software. For example, in the provision software we use the bridge feature and automated any notes of our tax adjustments so when we imported the trial balance into the system, and most of our tax adjustments were automatically there. In addition we used the categories grouping to make our 10K reporting much faster. We probably cut off about 2 weeks of time in our preparation of our 10K footnote by using the groupings that were set up in the system as part of the implementation.”

Like her story? Vote by clicking “Like” on her story (log in to your Google account) and help her win an iPad.

This post originally ran on our ONESOURCE blog. 

 

If you missed the first year end success story, check it out here. 

Does this scenario sound familiar? Not enough time, limited capacity amongst staff; but still tasked with improving the quality of financial information in a shorter amount of time?  This is exactly what one global hospitality company’s tax department  faced when using spreadsheets to calculate their provision.

Monique Smith explains in the video below why her progressive tax department turned to automation and how they are now creating more accurate reports for both executives and auditors by using ONESOURCE Tax Provision.

“I’ve been using ONESOURCE products since 2007. Currently we use ONESOURCE Tax Provision and I’m really impressed with all of the enhancements, especially the state reports. Using the provision software has helped us take a step back and really do a detailed scrub-analysis, helping us be more in line with where we should be.“ – Monique Smith – Senior Tax Analyst

Monique’s Year End Best Practice Tip of the Day:

“We realized that doing the whole provision in excel is the old way. After using the tax provision software for a few closes, we tried to see where the key areas of improvement were, so that we could use the software in the best possible way.” (more…)

After a month-long search, we’ve narrowed your success story entries to 5 top finalists! Watch to learn how different tax departments have overcome challenges and improved their compliance process. Each day this week, vote by clicking “Like” on your favorite year-end success story!

Today’s featured story comes from The Cheesecake Factory (video below). After being over-reliant on manual data entry and time-consuming processes, like balancing the provision in Microsoft® Office Excel, this tax department turned to automation to streamline their compliance process.

“Balancing the provision in spreadsheets is usually the cause of all my late nights in January, and can take me up to a week. By doing the entire provision in ONESOURCE Tax Provision, I was able to save a week during year-end and not have to worry about getting the journal entry to balance in Excel.” – Michelle Nachman, Senior Tax Manager, The Cheesecake Factory

Michelle’s Year End Best Practice Tip of the Day:

When asked what she’d want other companies to learn from her process, Michelle shared:

“The provision can be done with minimal to no data entry to ensure accuracy of information. We use the Active Workpapers module of ONESOURCE Tax Provision, to bring in all of our adjustments which makes the entire process much quicker and easier.” (more…)