The best practices of our Fortune 500 and middle market clients are baked into TaxStream's flexible framework. This allows you to benefit from our many years of experience in the design of efficient processes and the automation of workflows within a corporate tax department.

One Process for the Entire Tax Year

We have developed a number of best practices which integrate the tax provision with the compliance process. In general, we believe that the tax provision should be the heart of all compliance calculations made throughout the tax year. This results in a single process where the same data and the same technology is reused in a highly efficient manner.

What to Automate

The decision to automate certain data feeds and calculations depends heavily upon your underlying data structures. Your TaxStream implementation team will be familiar with those permanent and temporary differences that lend themselves to easy automation by pulling directly from the general ledger.

Journal entries can be automatically posted to the general ledger from TaxStream. This allows for ledgers to be updated in real time.

Data Collection and Review

Offline sources for more difficult adjustments can also be bridged into TaxStream using a variety of techniques, including spreadsheet import and web-based data collection.

In every TaxStream implementation, it is critical to leave room in the process for review and adjustments. All adjustments are documented and date-stamped to ensure that the appropriate internal controls are in place.

Timing

In our experience, we have found that corporate tax departments may have only days, or even hours, to complete their annual and quarterly tax provisions. Therefore, we make the availability of information during the accounting cycle a critical consideration during your TaxStream implementation. Certain information, such as consolidation entries, may not be available until late in the close. This means that your TaxStream process must be designed in a way that is flexible enough to react to transactions at any time.

Internal Controls

Best practices in internal control include the TaxStream audit trail which captures and stores every transaction. These transactions can be sorted by user, by permanent difference, by temporary difference, by unit and by date range. Our enterprise-level offerings also contain advanced features for document management and structure controls. The result is a useful tool in building up your internal controls and satisfying the requirements of Sarbanes-Oxley.