Tax departments are tasked with several important responsibilities, including ensuring compliance with tax regulations, managing and analyzing large amounts of data and providing accurate and timely reports to stakeholders.
Increasing regulatory changes have heightened the complexity of these responsibilities, leading to more time being spent on complex, often manual, tasks. Tax departments can leverage low-code/no-code solutions to operate more effectively and upskill their tax professionals.
What is a low-code/no-code solution?
Low-code/no-code platforms and tools allow organizations to design, customize and deploy software solutions without the need for expert coding knowledge or technology expertise through visual environments that eliminate the need to write code. In the low-code/no-code model, tax professionals become citizen developers, building and deploying solutions and without the use of IT professionals. This technology gives business users a faster and more efficient way to build and launch new tools to improve their operations and provides a visual software interface that encourages model-driven processes.
Low-code/no-code tools offer an appealing option for several of the challenges faced by tax departments, including:
- Complex tax regulations: Low-code/no-code tools can quickly adapt to ever-changing laws and regulations. Reducing the reliance on the IT function to make changes to systems reduces the risk of penalties and errors related to late or incorrect filings.
- Data management: Tax departments are tasked with sifting through data provided from a variety of sources in an assortment of formats. Low-code/no-code tools allow the tax department to improve accuracy by building customized data processes to automate the ingestion, processing and validation of this data.
- Collaboration: The tax process often involves collaboration across several departments, stakeholders and third-party providers. Tax departments can use low-code/no-code tools to enhance traditional project trackers, calendars and other collaboration methods by introducing automated reminders, status updates, process flows and status dashboards.
- Process automation: On average, employees spend more than 350 hours performing repetitive tasks in spreadsheets. However, many of these processes can be either wholly or partially automated. Tax professionals can pair their knowledge of business and tax rules with low-code/no-code tools to create process automations, freeing up time and reducing the risk of errors.
How do these tools help improve user experience and integration?
The capabilities of low-code/no-code tools have been improving rapidly over the past several years. Tools such as Microsoft Power Platform and Alteryx have been putting a focus on user experience, customization and integration with existing data sources. SAP has even recently released its own native low-code solution. Tax departments may also find their organization has already made investments in these tools, making it even easier to begin developing solutions.
Automation is just one of the many use cases for these solutions. Tax professionals can utilize these tools to remove manual steps and streamline month-end close, fixed assets, transfer pricing and tax workpapers population. These solutions can also improve compliance and reaction speed. Driven by data and maintained by the tax department rather than IT, they offer more flexibility and adaptability. Whenever the source data changes or new legislation, like Pillar 2, is introduced, tax departments can modify and deploy solutions with ease.
Adoption of low-code/no-code solutions by tax departments is important not only for improving efficiency and reducing risk, but also to strategically compete in a post-COVID job market where there is a growing shortage of accountants. Effectively leveraging technology to free up tax professionals for value-add tax analysis rather than manual data wrangling tasks is an attractive recruiting and retention tool.
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