There’s no doubting that Oracle Cloud is a treasure trove for tax teams; loaded to the hilt with functionality and features capable of powering modern-day finance processes.
It’s a truly remarkable piece of kit, which is why I often lament the fact so many finance professionals are oblivious to so many of the hidden gems locked away within their Oracle system.
Each of these relatively unknown and underused features has the potential to transform a tax team’s current processes, enabling you to benefit from enhanced automation, improved data flow and ultimately greater performance when it comes to tax determination, application and reporting.
In this article, I’ll aim to shine a light on one such feature that I believe can revolutionise tax reporting for any business: Oracle Transactional Business Intelligence, or OTBI as it’s commonly known.
What is OTBI?
OTBI is a reporting tool loaded in Oracle Cloud that provides embedded analytics and reports in relation to journals, accounts and balances within Financials. Businesses are able to use OTBI reports as part of the reconciliation process.
Users can run OTBI to pull data from anywhere across the entire Oracle Cloud ecosystem to create bespoke reports.
It helps users to quickly and reliably uncover and visualise business insights, driving more informed decision making and faster responses to emerging trends.
OTBI is able to critically analyse business data and query it to provide answers to specific questions your business needs answers to.
What’s more, results can be presented and accessed in the way that best suits your needs; whether in tables and graphs, on an Excel sheet, via user-friendly dashboards or in shared files.
How can OTBI be leveraged for tax?
Providing the relevant data is in your Oracle Cloud system, it can be extracted by OTBI and used to create reports.
It’s an incredibly powerful tool – it’s hard to believe it comes as part of the native functionality of the platform!
Starting with multiple seeded reports direct from OTBI, additional fields can be added over time and new data extracts set up to create a series of bespoke processes that deliver precisely the reports your business requires at the right time. All with minimal human input and a guarantee of accuracy.
Reports can be created for all departments – not just Tax – within the wider Finance landscape to provide a real-time view of exactly how much tax is being charged and how much is due.
Making the most of OTBI
While the fact this native functionality exists is sure to be welcome news to your tax leaders, configuring it correctly remains a hazardous prospect without Oracle tax expertise.
That’s why we’re pleased to be able to help our clients to utilise this powerful tool to create unprecedented reporting standards and enjoy a new level of visibility of tax data.
Our Oracle consultants know all the relevant data sources, data points, questions to answer and formatting tricks required to harness OTBI and deliver the results your Reporting team desires.
We’ll provide all the information and advice you need regarding the location of data within your Oracle database and how to access it.
And once you’ve built initial template reports, there’s nothing to stop you utilising your in-house resources in the future to refine and amend the processes required to produce reports that meet your evolving needs, making OTBI a future-proofed solution for even the largest businesses.
Intrigued by OTBI and how it could help your tax reporting? Get in touch with us today for more information.