GT launches ptvault.x | Grant Thornton

CHICAGO — Grant Thornton LLP has launched ptvault.x, a new platform to help companies manage personal-property taxes. The cloud-based platform provides Grant Thornton’s clients with data transparency and reduced complexity.

It also features an optional push-through predictor that helps clients more quickly and effectively recover pass-through taxes that may have previously been elusive — potentially resulting in significant savings in time and money.

Grant Thornton’s tax teams will administer and use ptvault.x as part of their client-service delivery, allowing tracking capabilities for property-tax documentation, while also helping clients meet compliance obligations and estimate tax exposures.

In addition, ptvault.x gives clients access to their data through a user-friendly portal. This allows client-side tax professionals and customer-service specialists to quickly and easily view critical data, such as lease records, parcel information and property-tax payment histories.

Grant Thornton originally developed the platform — which uses the firm’s proprietary version of optical character recognition (OCR) software — for leasing companies. After realizing the broader potential of ptvault.x, the firm adapted it for all clients with large numbers of parcels.

“Property tax is an intricate area of taxation that requires specialized knowledge and experience from state to state, jurisdiction to jurisdiction and industry to industry,” said Don Lippert, a principal in Grant Thornton’s State and Local Tax practice. “Grant Thornton’s property-tax teams, which are based across the U.S. in multiple offices, will use ptvault.x to help clients cut through these complexities in potent new ways.”

Key features and capabilities of ptvault.x and the push-through predictor include:

Advanced estimator that helps pinpoint property-tax exposures.
Geo-coding system that enables clients to accurately determine specific tax jurisdictions and tax rates by address.
An intuitive and user-friendly interface to manage documents, such as leases, in one place.
Superior workflow process that keeps clients apprised of communications and tracks the progress and resolution of work items.
Additional benefits in areas such as: tax-bill administration; assessment administration; property-tax estimation; and assistance in managing check processing and forwarding with third-party vendors.

According to Lippert: “The ptvault.x value proposition is multifold — it dramatically reduces the time it takes to manage personal-property tax functions, and it delivers more predictable results through our OCR technology and automated-analysis capabilities. It’s a powerful complement to Grant Thornton’s wealth of experience in property-tax valuation, negotiation and administration.”

Another alyx platform innovation Grant Thornton developed ptvault.x with the help of alyx™, a digital platform it recently launched for transformation and innovation. The platform is available to all of Grant Thornton’s service professionals so they can help quickly solve specific business problems for clients with new and emerging technologies.

The alyx platform uses a ‘concierge-enabled’ system that methodically shares business problems with teams of subject-matter specialists and technologists. These teams subsequently develop solutions by combining know-how in Grant Thornton’s core service areas — accounting, tax and consulting — with technologies such as intelligent automation, data extraction, data cleansing, analytics and blockchain.

Grant Thornton recently used alyx to develop SOC.x, a new platform to more efficiently produce reports covering System and Organization Controls, better known as SOC reports.

“Launching ptvault.x fresh on the heels of SOC.x demonstrates just how much of a game changer the alyx platform is proving to be,” said Joseph Brown, Grant Thornton’s national managing partner of Market Innovation and Release Management. “The platform is doing exactly what we intended it to: Connecting the people who identify business problems with those who build practical technology-driven solutions.”

For more information about ptvault.x, visit www.gt.com/ptvault.

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