Year-end chaos

🔍 Ever wondered what happens in the tax world during the year-end frenzy? It’s that time again 😵‍💫. As we approach the year-end, companies brace for the Q4-Q1 madness. For us tax folks, it's our own kind of 'joyful' season 🎉.

I have been there myself, many times. Reconciling GAAP to STAT to TAX, identifying perm and timing differences, and collaborating to come to a group tax provision and ETR 📊.

I still vividly recall the pain of sending across Excel templates for these reconciliations. Templates that needed to be completed by local finance, in order to get to the estimated taxable basis, departing from the reporting GAAP numbers. And quarter over quarter, the same thing always happened -local stakeholders were late with providing their input or the accuracy and overall quality of the input was far below expectations. Endless back and forth of emails and iterations of the same Excel templates. Resulting in high stress levels, long working hours and strained relationships with these local stakeholders.

Then the next challenge came up - reconciling all these inputs into a master spreadsheet that serves as the basis for the tax provision and ETR calculations. First problem: ensuring that the final version of the input from local finance is being used (a highly risky affair given the many iterations on the input of the local finance teams). Secondly, ensuring that also in the master spreadsheet the right comments are captured while keeping a full audit trail of all the input that gets consolidated. Because yes, your statutory auditor will challenge you on the figures reported.

You know what was most frustrating to me? The fact that the reported data and comments often stay in these spreadsheets. In other words, the generated data had a single-use nature, whereas, if it were captured in a structured format, it would be a very rich source of intelligence.

Let's use this calm before the storm ⛈️ to rethink and improve our tax processes.

Also, if you are one of the lucky few who are not impacted by the year-end madness… you probably have time to watch our webinar about how to become a data-driven tax department, it might come in handy for next year: How to Become a Data-Driven Tax Department