Reviewing the Current State of your Tax Technology

Tax technology is more important today than it has ever been before, so now is the right time for tax departments to perform a current state review. An understanding of tax technology and the role it should play within your tax department is one key element; the other is a proven methodology.

Tax technology first emerged as a discipline at the beginning of the 1980s with the birth of personal computers and spreadsheets and has expanded exponentially ever since. It is no longer a new discipline but an integral part of how professionals perform their daily tasks. Almost everything a tax department does from day to day uses tax technology.

Our core data comes from ERP and GL systems and is accessed via laptops, tablets or even smart watches. There are specialist solutions for CIT, VAT, PAYE, tax depreciation, transfer pricing, customs, MTD, SAF-T, iXBRL and so on. We also have generic tools for data manipulation, robotic process automation (RPA), machine learning (ML) and data analytics (DA), not forgetting of course databases and the tax practitioner’s ever-present friend, the spreadsheet.

In this article, we look at how tax technology is playing a role in organisations and what methodology companies can use to review this.

Tax technology should be saving your organisation time, improving the quality of work, and adding value to departments that would otherwise be lost. Reviewing the current state of your tax technology allows you to identify the gap between what it should be doing and what it actually is doing, and make the necessary improvements.