TaxStream's technology relationships allow for the continued development of our products, including increased integration with their respective products.
Oracle's Hyperion
TaxStream has entered into a partnership with Oracle, specifically its Hyperion product line, the leading provider of financial consolidation software. The partnership will support a solution that allows users to populate TaxStream directly from their financial consolidation.
For many years, corporate tax departments have sought to use financial reporting systems to meet their tax accounting requirements. The advantages of such an arrangement are clear:
- Single source for tax sensitive data (one version of the truth).
- One mapping exercise (rather than a different map to each underlying general ledger).
- Most timely source of data (includes up to the minute consolidation entries).
- Minimal reconciliations (all source data agrees with the final audited financial statements).
- Ease of maintenance (the consolidation process is owned and maintained by the finance department).
The main impediment to achieving these benefits has been that most financial consolidations do not maintain sufficient detail to support the needs of the tax department. As data moves through higher and higher reporting levels, accounts and entities are often combined so that tax sensitive data becomes lost. For example, general ledgers typically maintain legal entity and reserve account detail, both of which are needed for tax accounting. However, legal entity and reserve accounts are merged into fewer and fewer lines as the consolidation proceeds, making the financials less useful as a source for tax sensitive data.
This problem has been addressed by Oracle’s Hyperion Financial Data Quality Management (“FDM”) application. FDM sits between the general ledgers and the top consolidation, providing all of the detail that supports the final financial statements. With FDM, users can access detailed general ledger balances (source accounts) as well as high level consolidated balances (target accounts) in a single application. Both source and target accounts can be accessed via an interface that allows users to create their own TaxStream load file.
User defined extracts can be easily created and maintained, providing a source for tax sensitive accounts to be used in the provision, extensions, estimates, returns and planning. Once imported into TaxStream, these same extracts are stored permanently within the TaxStream database as part of the audit trail.
Where a company has multiple general ledgers, FDM can create a single extract that pulls all tax sensitive data from the most convenient source. For example, Subsidiary A might roll up several reserve balances to a single target account that is used to compute a temporary difference. In this case, mapping the target account to TaxStream is most efficient. Subsidiary B might have many different reserves (some tax sensitive and some not) rolling up to a single target account. Here, it would be more efficient to map the source accounts to TaxStream. In this way, users can create a single map that best suits their unique data structures.
FDM has a number of features that ensure that detailed accounts are in sync with consolidated results. This assures users that the source and target accounts they import into TaxStream is reliable and agree with the consolidated financial statements.
TaxStream and Oracle’s Hyperion are currently developing an interface that allows journal entries to flow directly from TaxStream into the final consolidation. This will complete that link between the two systems, providing complete support for the final tax provision recorded in the audited financial statements.
With FDM, users will be able to populate TaxStream with a single file that includes all detailed or rolled up accounts, whichever is more efficient. This file is easy to create and maintain and will agree with the final audited financial statements. Journal entries will flow directly into the final consolidation from TaxStream.