This week’s Thought Leadership in Finance blog features a review of three
As states look for more ways to collect sales
The
Kai explained why all companies should care about sales and use compliance:
- Small errors or omissions in reports can translate into big dollar fines
- Achieving and maintaining compliance with dynamic regulations that vary significantly across and even with states is complicated at best
- Government budget shortfalls mean significantly increased audit activity, and auditors are looking under every rock to find reasons to levy big fines
- Increased awareness by customers on accuracy of sales tax charges.
- Increased risk of non-compliance being considered criminal activity, and not just financial in terms of penalties & interest
Kai also shared how companies can experience a “quick win” in terms of improving compliance and avoiding audits and fines by using a few basic practices in terms of customer address validation & enrichment. In terms of address customer address verification Kai offered the following:
- The main difference between address verification vendor offerings is GIS vs. a non-GIS level of data accuracy
- When completing a batch scrub of an existing customer addresses a company should anticipate that 5-10% of addresses can’t be validated and follow up effort will be required to clean up this gap
- The USPS web site does not provide sufficient accuracy in terms of company address verification for sales tax purposes
In terms of taxability determination & calculations solution and service providers, the following are questions that companies should consider asking to potential providers:
- Do you support a standard integration to my invoicing & procurement systems?
- Does your taxability matrix have sufficient granularity / categories for my industry?
- Do you offer robust configuration capabilities which are required to support complex taxability decisions?
- What is the total cost of
operations (TCO) for your solution? What drives the TCO?
Kai discussed how to ensure success in improving your company’s sales and use compliance framework:
- Assess your current transaction tax costs & risks before evaluating technology solutions.
- Assess where you should be collecting sales tax / taxability of the products & services you provide.
- Garbage in, garbage out – assess how tax sensitized master data is within billing systems.
- Gain buy-in from all stakeholder groups within the organization.
- Follow proven software implementation methodology (even with cloud-based solutions). Don’t underestimate potential internal resource requirements.
Finally, Kai offered the following 5 steps for any company to leverage in reducing sales and use tax risk exposures:
- Evaluate where your company has collection responsibilities (“nexus”) and on which products & services your company provides
- Ensure your systems are properly sales tax sensitized and that front-line resources understand the importance of accurate information
- Objectively evaluate the costs & risks of your company’s current sales & use tax environment
- Evaluate sales tax compliance
management solutions – objectively determine the must haves from the nice to haves for your company in terms of functionality. - Make sure you have buy-in from all impacted internal stakeholder groups technology / process improvement projects (including those relative to sales and use tax).
Discover how your company can identify and mitigate sales and use tax risk exposures by viewing the webinar recording of 5 Steps to Removing Risk from Sales and Use Tax Compliance .
Effectively managing resources is challenging for any company, and a lack of visibility into information on operational factors that impact margins and drive demand makes it nearly impossible. During the webinar, Aligning HR & Finance: How ReddyIce Transformed to Market Leader, Manish Patel, Global Vice President of Collaborative Solutions, and Elliott Lester, VP of IT, ReddyIce shared actionable advice for companies to leverage in:
- Identifying the metrics that really impact your business and help drive demand
- Building flexible resource gap analysis models with real-time consumable data
- Understanding when to incorporate unstructured external data to improve resource and product demand predictability
- Gain a real-time view of headcount by integrating key human capital management data (HCM) into your company’s financial planning environment
Elliott Lester, VP of IT, ReddyIce discussed how his company was able to leverage enterprise-wide visibility to break down operational silos, transform processes, improve product margins, and develop actionable metrics to drive the allocation of key company resources to transform from a company on the brink of extinction to a market leader with sustainable competitive advantage.
Elliott discussed how ReddyIce turned to the cloud to updating their technology to:
- Build an IT infrastructure that is elastic and allows for real-time change
- Align labor with business needs
- Integrate management process into every flavor of ReddyIce’s business IT
- Create a true customer-driven business using real-time analytics from the edge of the organization
- Drive results across the enterprise from predictive customer behaviors
ReddyIce is currently able to effectively manage one of the perishable inventory items of all, ice, and a dynamic fleet of drivers delivering ice and other perishable just-in-time inventory to an ever-expanding customer base with diverse product needs.
Discover exactly how ReddyIce was able to transform and align its systems and processes to build and enhance sustainable competitive advantage by viewing the webinar recording of Aligning HR & Finance: How ReddyIce Transformed to Market Leader .
The eminent demise of Excel as the analytical tool of choice for growing and dynamic companies has been a common topic of conversation among financial professionals over the past five years. The webinar, The Marriage of Excel & ERP: A Match Made in Heaven for Chipotle, introduced attendees to Excel-based automation and analysis tools that allow companies operating within multiple ERP environments to create a reporting frameworks that deliver the right information at the right time to the right people to drive results across the enterprise leveraging Excel as the foundation.
Caitlyn Gill, Director, Global Software, Inc. demonstrated exactly how companies are leveraging Global Software, Inc.’s leading automation and analysis tools to:
- Enable a company’s spreadsheet users to have live access to ERP systems including Oracle, SAP, and JD Edwards, amongst others) data within Excel
- Leverage Excel-based ERP reporting processes in general ledger
accounting , accounts payable, purchase order processing, inventory management, and more - Save time and increase efficiencies while reducing errors in financial and operational reporting processes
- Leverage existing ERP reports in Excel and eliminate rekeying, downloading & exporting data
- Serve as the foundation for live and dynamic reporting and analysis
- Enable a company’s spreadsheet users to have live access to ERP systems including Oracle, SAP, and JD Edwards, amongst others) data within Excel
- Leverage Excel-based ERP reporting processes in general ledger accounting, accounts payable, purchase order processing, inventory management, and more
- Save time and increase efficiencies while reducing errors in financial and operational reporting processes
- Leverage existing ERP reports in Excel and eliminate rekeying, downloading & exporting data
- Serve as the foundation for live and dynamic reporting and analysis
A compelling case study was delivered by Joe Knipp, Accounting Systems Analyst, Chipotle Mexican Grill who shared his company’s journey in leveraging Global Software, Inc.’s leading automation and analysis tools to marry Excel to their ERP systems to create a reporting framework that supports the centralized processing of accounts payable for over 1,600 stores. Joe discussed:
- How his organization was able to generate a savings of $300,000+ with exception reports by optimizing Chipoltle’s reporting environment.
- How Chipolte is actively managing data and creating dynamic reports in Excel by dynamically pulling ERP data into Excel
- Why it was not really a choice them abandoning their powerful ERP solutions for a Cloud solution just for better reporting as Chipotle was able to enhance the power of Excel for Chipolte’s financial and operating reporting needs
- How to leverage the existing Excel expertise at Chipolte to unlock the true power of Excel
- How he is able to easily e-mail and schedule customizable reports
Discover exactly why Excel can be the right choice for your company’s complicated and dynamic reporting needs by viewing the webinar recording of 5 Steps to Removing Risk from Sales and Use Tax Compliance.