From 48 hours to 15 minutes: How our Tax Data Tower slashes time spent on tax reporting

As a tax professional, you’ll be familiar with the traditional tax return process; from running a report after your GL period has been closed to securing all the tax data in a single place, although in our experience this is rarely the case.

Depending on the size of your business, the tax report will take anything between a few hours and several days to complete.

After you click the ‘submit’ button, the process usually looks something like this:

1. Collect the tax-related data required to file your various reports from your tax lines for a specified period.
2. Collect other tax-related data from other sources, e.g. GL, receipts etc.
3. Incorporate the customer/supplier details.
4. Add the Tax Registration Number (TRNTax Registration Number, sometimes known as VAT Registration Number (VRN)) for both the supplier and the customer in the transaction, often looking at multiple locations for the TRN
5. Fill in the transaction details, such as invoice number, description, total amount, total tax amount.
6. Find any invoice lines details and accounting entries for both recoverable and non-recoverable tax.
7. Check the payment status of the transaction in case of deferment.

This laborious task is run at a single point in time, such as month end; typically taking a business more than 48 hours to complete, requiring significant manual input and coming with a hefty risk of error attached.

But tax reporting doesn’t have to be this way.

That’s why our team of experienced taxologists have developed the Tax Data Tower – and incorporated this design at the heart of our VAT repository solution, InSyte™, allowing a tax report in just 15 minutes – at any time of the month!

What is our Tax Data Tower?

We understand that a good tax solution must be global in nature with the ability to accommodate country-specific requirements. Of course, this only adds to the volume of data being pulled through a system, so efficient and accurate automation is also essential.

The Tax Data Tower – also known as the Tax Data Stack – is a process of building up the layers of tax data of a single record required for tax returns and other tax reports over several phases across a longer timeframe.

The Tax Data Tower function continually extracts data and builds it up until it is complete and in a single place. So rather than waiting until month end to run a report, with the Tax Data Tower all the data is already in place and your report is super-fast to run and extract at any time.

Rather than waiting until your GL period has been closed off before you get to see your tax return data for the first time, you can run your reports on any day of the month. Being able to continually check and visualise your tax data throughout the month, analysing and reconciling the data as you go, means you can run your final tax return report in less time than an average coffee break!

How does it work?

Accurate data is the key to great tax reporting, so the first objective of the Tax Data Tower is to obtain the raw tax lines from the source systems and convert these to a VAT ledger, which is completed in our InSyte™ tax repository. Tax records are retrieved at the lowest possible level to ensure 100% accuracy in all subsequent calculations.

In the later stages, the Tax Data Tower extracts additional data you need – such as the customer ID from an invoice and then the customer name from the newly-acquired customer ID.

Another benefit of the structure outlined in the diagrams above is the ability to take data from multiple sources (and even the ability to take the raw tax line from one source system and the details from another) to power the full capabilities of the Tax Data Tower.

We believe our creation will provide businesses with the best of both worlds: immense time savings alongside ultimate precision and compliance.

As our name suggests, our team is always innovating and we’re incredibly proud and excited about our Tax Data Tower concept and looking forward to demonstrating how it works within our InSyte™ tax repository.

We can’t wait to see the difference it will make to tax teams around the world!