Business Issue
The tax function is one of the largest consumers of data within an organization that not only collects core trial balance data from financial systems, but also gathers data from other applications including transactional, legal entity, and document and calendar management. Needs and requirements related to data are constantly expanding and evolving for tax, however, processes have remained very manual, requiring a significant amount of time and effort that could otherwise be spent on other value-added activities. Additionally, regulators and other third parties are requesting tax teams to produce reports even quicker than in the past, sometimes on-demand. In a recent PwC study, it was found that tax teams spend roughly 40 to 60 percent of their time on data management functions and only 30 percent on strategic analysis.
Target Client
Cross industry. Companies that are looking to reduce costs by automation, improve quality, performance and maintain better controls.
Impact/Benefit to Client
As a result of implementing ETL tools, tax teams are able to refocus their time from performing data manipulation to engaging in strategic initiatives such as data analytics and modeling. To drive success, a coordinated adoption of new processes and tools utilized by both tax and non-tax leadership is essential in realizing the values of technology investments within the tax function.
Description of Service
The Data Automation ("DA") service offering leverages small automation tools as a way to increase efficiency. DA assists tax departments in adopting technologies that allow self-serviced automation of data extraction, manipulation, and outputs while operating within the existing controls environment. These self-service automation tools provide common benefits to clients through the following approaches:
· Academies – Combines the upskilling of client personnel in automation trends and the identification of practical use cases, enabling the application of TRS services and ongoing support of clients' tech enablement
· Assessment – Review existing processes to identify data gaps and pain points within manually intensive processes in order to create an inventory of data requirements, sources, and gaps to facilitate the design and execution of efficient solutions
· Design/ Build – Design process and technology solutions for data sourcing and extraction by leveraging existing data platforms, incorporating self-service automation tools, data staging, anomaly detection and reconciliation, and embedding automated data validations
· Deploy or Run as Managed Service – Designed to enable the rapid deployment of the automation model(s), or for PwC to run as a managed service
· Strategy/ Governance – Establish a sustainable and agile governance model that formalizes stakeholder roles & responsibilities, enables the review and update of internal controls, addresses additional change management challenges, and monitors business and legislative changes
