How Tax Data Management is Rewriting the 80/20 Rule

Attention, tax professionals: Are you ready to spend more time on the fun stuff?

This question relates to the additional time tax professionals can spend on providing strategic value to their organization, thanks to breakthroughs in advanced technology and tax data management. 

Traditionally, most tax professionals have spent 80 percent of their time gathering, reconciling and managing vast amounts of tax data – and the remaining 20 percent of their energy finding ways to add value to the organization. However, by utilizing current technology, tax functions can leverage data to provide additional insight and transparency into their organization and drive business decisions that deliver shareholder value. Instead of spending most of your time correcting, double checking and fixing bad data for compliance, you can now use that time to inform the business on tax saving opportunities.
    
This topic cropped up at the recent Institute for Professionals in Taxation® (IPT) conference, where I had the pleasure of presenting on how data management technology is reshaping the tax function and a high-level assessment of what’s changed with regard to data management. Tax technology has become much more affordable and powerful; in other words, it can do a lot more, a lot faster, and also reduces risk in the process. 

This is good news because tax is the largest consumer of financial data, and can now use their data as an asset. The key to unlocking these opportunities is to understand what tax automation can do for you, your department and your company. 

This knowledge is becoming increasingly important as IT and tax progress in their transformation. Technology-driven transformation, which promises to free up more time for tax planning, will not happen overnight. It’s a process that requires attention and thought – as we aim to flip that 80/20 equation and use data and automation to elevate the role of tax within the organization.

If you had 80 percent of your time to add value, what would you do?