Liquidity Diligence and Unlocking Cash

Helping you explore all opportunities for creating liquidity from your operations

Some organizations regularly undertake reviews of operations and transactions to monitor compliance and identify any areas of liquidity leakage. When navigating change and uncertainty, other organizations focus on increasing liquidity and maximizing cash flow. Even those that are performing well are looking to raise and conserve cash, and all organizations are feeling the pressure to grow while carefully managing costs.

For organizations looking to build resilience and achieve sustainable growth, we can help you uncover opportunities to identify areas of liquidity leakage and unlock cash. We’ll work with you to create liquidity in key areas of your business, including labour, transactions, capital investments and your tax function so you can meet your short- and long-term goals.

Key drivers for unlocking cash

Labour

Capital investment and infrastructure strategy

Customer transactions

Tax compliance and
corporate structure

Backed by technology and supported by a community of solvers with a wide range of knowledge and skills, we’ve created a streamlined and integrated approach to unlocking cash.

We offer:

Combined expertise

We bring together expertise from our tax and consulting practices, giving us the experience and scale to immediately get to work following an initial assessment of your needs.

Data-driven
approach

By tapping into information from a variety of sources, we can help you explore all angles and ensure the best outcomes for your organization.

Single point
of contact

You'll have a single point of contact for your services, which reduces touchpoints and data requests and gives you a consolidated view of the benefits realized for your organization, progress and cash unlocked.

Liquidity Diligence and Unlocking Cash at a glance

Liquidity Diligence and Unlocking Cash is a unique service by PwC which allows us to take a holistic approach and bring together our subject matter experts around the concept of generating liquidity from daily transactions and tax tangential activities. The idea is to help our clients create liquidity by delivering established services in a way that creates value, leverages data and enhances the client experience with one point of contact.

Canadian R&D
US R&D
Government incentives
Indirect tax/recovery
Direct tax recovery
Duplicate Payments & Vendor Statement Recovery (Third party spend optimization):
Payroll leakage assessment
Fixed-asset planning
Customs and Excise

Canadian R&D

We offer services ranging from the full scope of SR&ED services, including claim strategy and preparation, to a review of your existing claims and systems. We’ve developed a methodology tailored to the program’s regulatory regime, allowing us to be a valuable partner in helping clients navigate complex eligibility assessments and other claim requirements. We have extensive experience helping clients navigate CRA audits, notices of objection and litigation as required.

US R&D

We help companies identify federal and state Research and Development tax credits, enabling them to realize cash tax savings for qualified research activities.

We combine our leading R&D tax knowledge and services with an innovative web application called Global Incentives Solutions, R&D tax credit software designed to effectively and efficiently identify qualified research expenses around the world.

Government incentives

Our phased approach allows us to get a better understanding of the client's planned/upcoming projects and major investments to then put together a roadmap of government/non-government grants and incentive programs that may be applicable. We help clients prepare applications and provide support to funding agencies as part of ongoing compliance. We apply our extensive knowledge of the funding landscape, increasing your chances of a successful application.

Indirect tax/recovery

Canada's indirect tax system is complex with some provinces having harmonized their federal and provincial taxes, while others operate with two parallel systems. This regional variation makes it difficult for both domestic and foreign corporations to comply with the tax system.

Our Indirect Tax team can help formulate, implement and manage a company's sales tax blueprint as well as issues including recovering unclaimed sales taxes through a comprehensive and non-intrusive review delivered by a senior team of indirect tax professionals.

Direct tax recovery

The direct tax recovery review is a specialized diagnostic review of the accounting information that feeds into the corporate tax return (similar to the indirect tax review). It uses specialized software and proprietary analysis tools to identify corporate, capital and withholding tax payments. The review isn’t an income tax audit, but it can result in cash refunds and permanent tax savings as well as a favourable tax benefit to your financial statements. It can also mitigate non-deductible interest and penalties from government audits. Also can include a deep dive into the company's fixed asset strategy and planning to optimize fixed asset capitalization from a tax perspective.

Duplicate Payments & Vendor Statement Recovery (Third party spend optimization):

We perform a deep dive into an organization's supply chain to identify both retroactive cost recoveries and go forward cost savings. Leveraging a suite of proprietary tools and data analytics, the third party population / contract universe is analyzed to identify spend optimization opportunities across Duplicate Payment & Vendor Statement Recovery; Contract Compliance Recovery; and Rapid Strategic Procurement.

Payroll leakage assessment

Research suggests that organizations lose an average of 0.5%-2.5% to Payroll leakage. A Payroll Leakage Assessment engagement uses data analytics and machine learning models to identify and quantify high-risk areas that lead to payroll leakage and the associated actions and benefits. We review employee data, payroll data, time entry data, and collective agreements and investigate the areas of the end to end value chain that are causing the leakage. Results of our tests can lead to improvement in controls to mitigate and reduce further leakage on a go forward basis.

Fixed-asset planning

Fixed-asset planning can allow for accelerated tax depreciation, especially where an expenditure was incorrectly included as a capital expense when it could have been treated as a period cost. Many provinces are also introducing fiscal and non-fiscal incentives related to investments in capital assets.PwC can help to analyze the timing of income and deductions, cost capitalization issues, and depreciation calculations.

Customs and Excise

Supply chain resilience is top of mind across the global trade community. Often importers do not fully understand the benefits of evaluating customs and international trade compliance implications at the beginning of their supply chain planning process. As such, importers often miss out on reducing the amount of customs duties payable when importing goods for their businesses. We've developed various strategies related to these issues and have the expertise to assist importers in identifying potential duties savings as well as compliance management opportunities. We take a diagnostic approach to identify both instances of excessive duty payments on past imports and opportunities to minimize duty payable on future imports.