Global Tax Management Reduces Manual Tax Compliance Processes By 50% With Alteryx

With rapid growth in its 25-year history, Global Tax Management, a corporate tax services firm offering a wide range of solutions to clients of all sizes, has found new ways each year to improve its processes and tax automation offerings to better serve its clients as the business world changes. More recently, the firm has seen how the power of data and analytics can be quickly adopted to unleash faster performance and better decision-making across their organization.

“Enabling our service offerings through the smart and advanced use of technology is a core part of our culture and business strategy,” says Ryan Lynch, Chief Technology and Information Officer at GTM. “We continuously search for areas where we can automate to better serve and address identified opportunities ambitiously. In addition, bringing more data-driven people into the organization supports us taking that mindset going forward.”

One such area of the firm that has been on the forefront of embracing automation is GTM’s Sales & Use Tax Compliance function – part of its Indirect Tax services group. “Sales and use tax compliance is a monthly repeatable process ripe for automation,” says David Hillegass, senior manager of indirect tax at GTM. “As we take on more clients, we have to manipulate disparate data sources to prepare their tax returns and filing information to be remitted to the various jurisdictions. We also must reconcile what we pay on behalf of our clients to jurisdictions against what our clients have logged into their general ledger accounts. With data manipulation and reconciliations happening monthly and a growing volume of client returns, we needed to find a solution that was repeatable, user friendly, and easily adaptable.”

“We started out with a free trial of Alteryx just to play around with the Platform and then began to bring in licenses for our team to use,” Hillegass says. “As part of the larger firm initiative, our team participated in an enablement program with Alteryx Premier Partner Data Prep U to walk us through trainings and Platform functionality, and to help us roll out the implementation process with greater ease.”

“With Alteryx, we’ve been able to significantly upgrade our automation as it relates to manipulating client data, performing reconciliations, and filing returns,” adds Hillegass. “What may have taken an hour before, now takes a half-hour to sort through disparate client data sources. It has given us a 50% reduction in manual processes.”

“Alteryx has been an incredible solution,” Hillegass says. “We service a lot of clients on the compliance side to help with their monthly needs. If we’re not able to be highly automated and repeatable, then our group would not thrive.”

“It’s created a feeling of excitement,” Lynch says. “Alteryx has been a spark plug for the organization to embrace technology more. People see the benefit right away, and they just want more and more of the Platform as we go. It’s been a big catalyst for change and will continue to be going forward.”

As for what’s next, GTM will continue to upscale its workforce, get more team members certified, and continue to automate its processes across other departments and for their clients. “We want to fully adopt the Platform for our entire group,” Hillegass says. “We think there are some steps in our current process that could be further automated, and we want to continuously deliver services for our clients in more efficient and innovative ways. I think we’ll be able to accomplish this since there hasn’t been an issue I haven’t been able to solve using Alteryx yet.”

“We’re going to calibrate our strategies by using real data to support our initiatives across all departments,” Yanocha says. “We recognize the value in data and analytics to inform us in business decision-making, instead of just acting on a best guess or estimate.”

“Data automation is quickly becoming a staple in the corporate tax department," adds Lynch. “Tax has a lot of repetitive and intensive data needs ripe for next level solutions. Leading tax departments are starting to hire in people who have expertise in those solutions, even if they don’t have much tax experience, and that will likely become even more prevalent over time.”