Tax data analytics

An agile tax department that leverages the power of analytics and visualization makes highly informed decisions, engages leadership more deeply through better understanding, reduces risk, and enhances productivity. The result is not only more informed decisions, but the tax department bringing increased value to its own organization.

Data analytics provides business intelligence and value across an entire organization, and not just for tax purposes. The resulting data transformation, analytics, and visualizations used by the tax department, though, provide financial insight into almost limitless scenarios including:

• Purchasing and sales trends
• Identifying inefficiencies
• Process improvement metrics
• Savings and exposure analysis

The Challenge

Many tax departments have invested in analytics only to find that the tool(s) cannot deliver real-time insights, are clunky or involve too many people or aggregation of inconsistent reports. Common roadblocks include:

• Tax managers are not directly connected to source data, and/or it is in multiple locations
• The data is not in a useable format
• There is not a single, concise tax data repository

These roadblocks stifle insight and frustrate staff, often rendering standard/un-customized analytics investments worthless.

Grant Thornton is here to help.

Automated Tax Intelligence

The alternative to existing analytics approaches is Automated Tax Intelligence, which focuses on rapid insights powered by user-friendly technology.

First, we help clients define what they are trying to achieve. This could be any of the following: better insight into current positions, efficiencies, improved communication to senior leadership, reduced risk, and company-wide enhanced transparency and productivity.

Upon establishing the best suited solution for an organization and conforming that solution to specific needs, we provide our clients hands-on assistance ensuring our service delivery is meeting expectations, that clients are able to use the service platform as presented, and that we are tailoring any solutions to the organization’s needs.

With the bells and whistles that technology provides, it is easy to get lost and to forget your desired tax goals. That is why our approach is tax first. We combine our deep bench of experienced tax professionals with our knowledge of analytics and visualization processes, always coming back to the desired business goals.

Delivering Automated Tax Intelligence

We help our clients achieve Automated Tax Intelligence by using solutions where we have experience such as Domo, Tableau, Microsoft PowerBI, and other high-powered tools. Our experienced and strategic use of various analytics platforms allows us to assist you in choosing the right solution and explore the chosen tool, so that the full potential of these tax intelligence tools are unlocked for your organization. Our experience can solve the challenge of using a single tool as a complete workflow chain and connecting all sources of data and the people to optimize the tax function. Most importantly, we add value to the overall organization.

Our solutions enable:

• Efficient data connection with standard connectors with such platforms as Excel, TaxView, and ONESOURCE Tax Provision
• Robust data cleansing and standardization easily managed by tax professionals
• Analytics designed for tax departments but easily digested organization-wide
• Clean, easy-to-understand data visualization for all levels of the organization
• Collaboration and support from Grant Thornton within the visualization tools