Unlocking tax savings through technology

There is significant opportunity for you as a tax leader in the consumer and retail industry to reduce costs in your tax function through technology. Your businesses are often unique in that 1) you have significant volumes of data, which is not always of good quality; 2) you often have unique and sometimes complex underlying ERP and other source systems as a result of growth through acquisitions and similar to other industries, you are often going through finance or ERP transformation programmes.

So how can you leverage technology to support you with all of these challenges and help optimise costs within your function?

1. Leverage AI to support with tax analysis and visualisation. AI has presented the opportunity to support with real-time automation, data validation, and data quality feedback loops. In addition, significant volumes of data provide the opportunity to deploy AI to help categorise and tax-sensitise this data. This is applicable to corporate tax, VAT, PSA and capital allowances, just to name a few. This helps significantly reduce the cost of analysis required for compliance.
2. Embed tax within your finance transformation program. If your business is going through a finance transformation program, it’s really important to get tax at the table early. Finance transformation programs are a unique opportunity to address legacy data challenges and ensure tax is getting what it needs from its systems, particularly in light of recent regulatory changes such as BEPS Pillar 2. Getting requirements up front significantly saves cost in the longer term to retrospective systems for tax compliance and regulatory requirements.
3. Upskill your teams with user-friendly technology. If your business is not going through a finance transformation program at the moment, then there are still a variety of tools that can help deliver benefits, from low-code solutions like Alteryx, which can help stitch together data sets, to analytics and visualisation tools like PowerBI to help analyse and present data. These tools are very user-friendly, and your tax function can upskill to use them. The benefit you get is increased efficiency, leading to significant time and cost reduction, reduced risk, and more value from your data.

So in short, there are numerous opportunities to help reduce cost and time through technology. Conversely, failure to act now means that your business runs the risk of falling behind the pack and can mean it carries more inefficiency and risk compared to your peers.

So, my 3 top tips for tax leaders to unlock the benefits of tax technology are:

1. Talk to us to get help with how to assess potential solutions for inefficient or risky processes.
2. Consider impact vs. effort for each solution and prioritise accordingly.
3. And finally, build a tax technology roadmap and start small to prove out the value.

Projects can be small and targeted, so we can usually work with all budgets, so do get in touch.