Corporate tax professionals working today know all too well the reporting and compliance pressures associated with calculating a year-end tax provision under ASC 740.
From estimating income taxes payable or refundable for the current year to calculating deferred taxes stemming from temporary differences between accounting and tax incomes, every action must be made with the right combination of speed and precision.
Add the complexities of 2025’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA), which brought sweeping tax changes that impact calculations, and FASB’s ASU 2023-09, which introduced heightened transparency and granularity in ASC 740 disclosures, and year-end pressures only intensify.
To get ahead of tax law change, manage increased workloads, and navigate the situational nuances and what-ifs that these new complexities bring, a growing number of corporate teams are relying on time-saving, modern tax software solutions.
In this article, learn how Bloomberg Tax’s powerful suite of solutions can help you streamline your workflows by expertly and accurately tracking, researching, applying, automating, and documenting your work.
Our tax intelligent software helps busy tax teams more efficiently and effectively plan for tomorrow while addressing today’s looming tax pressures.
- Read on to get a breakdown of these important points:
- What changed under ASU 2023-09
- How to accelerate ASC 740 disclosure workflows
- How to streamline end-of-year work and minimize reconciliation errors
- Why automation and defensibility wins audits
What new rules mean for year-end ASC 740 reporting
While OBBBA reshapes the tax landscape across individuals, corporations, and firms, ASU 2023-09 has established new categorical requirements for maintaining compliance with disclosure requirements for the ASC 740 tax provision, the accounting standard that governs how companies account for and report the effects of income taxes on financial statements under U.S. GAAP.
Tax preparers must know how to apply ASC 740 rules based on public and private corporations’ unique business activity and financial performance during a particular period.
But today, the implications from both OBBBA and ASU 2023-09 have serious consequences for provision workflows.
It’s important to note that certain changes carry more weight than others. The most impacted disclosures from these new rules include:
- Timing differences
- Rate reconciliations
- Jurisdictional detail, which can be determined by various factors
These regulatory updates can bring increasing expectations from auditors and regulators. So, to successfully implement ASU 2023-09 and accelerate year-end tax provision, tax, legal, and accounting departments should start by determining any necessary changes that should be made to existing disclosures.
Companies need to further consider the necessary existing and new internal controls to verify that income tax data is accumulated, checked, and assembled for disclosure consistent with new requirements.
Staying compliant with ASU 2023-09 and OBBBA requires more than awareness – it demands tools built for precision and speed. See how Bloomberg Tax can help you streamline disclosures, maintain granular jurisdictional detail, and strengthen internal controls.
What changed under ASU 2023-09
Before ASU 2023-09, investors relied on the rate reconciliation table and other disclosures, including total income taxes paid in the statement of cash flows, to evaluate income tax risks and opportunities.
But after receiving requests from investors for more transparency about income tax information, the FASB sought to “allow investors to better assess, in their capital allocation decisions, how an entity’s worldwide operations and related tax risks and tax planning and operational opportunities affect its income tax rate and prospects for future cash flows.”
So, what actually changed under ASU 2023-09 to help fulfill this FASB goal? In general, ASU 2023-09 now requires enhanced disclosures around rate reconciliations. It requires public business entities (PBEs) to annually disclose specific categories in their rate reconciliation and share “additional information for reconciling items that meet a quantitative threshold,” as noted in the FASB ASU.
ASU 2023-09 also introduced a new income taxes paid disclosure requirement within the ASC 740 footnote. This requirement is separate from the enhanced rate reconciliation disclosures and is one of the most significant additions in the update.
Entities must now disclose income taxes paid, disaggregated by jurisdiction. This is a major shift from the previous guidance, where entities typically reported only an aggregate cash taxes paid number in the statement of cash flows.
Under these new rules, companies must consider changes to workflows to ensure they are performing calculations on the necessary granularity of detail required for these new disclosure requirements.
Understanding these requirements is essential for tax professionals who manage disclosure requirements. [Learn more about how to comply with FASB updates to income tax disclosure requirements.]
Where year-end provision workflows break down
Even with years of specialized experience under their belts, highly skilled tax professionals can find preparing a year-end tax provision to be challenging without the right tools.
For example, using manual calculations and spreadsheets in your workflows can be time consuming and introduce a risk of human error.
In Bloomberg Tax’s Tax Changes Readiness Survey, 63% of surveyed corporate tax professionals said they still gather data manually from ERP and general ledger systems for tax calculations.
And 76% said they rely on Excel for these calculations, which further limits their efficiency and ability to respond with agility as regulations evolve.
Additional ways manual spreadsheets can cause workflow breakdowns include:
- Using manual calculations and spreadsheets to calculate tax provisions can cause breakdowns in year-end workflows if you have to manage common issues such as late-cycle law changes and last-minute data updates.
- Disconnected calculation and disclosure tools also can cause slowdowns, along with taxes-paid schedules that don’t actually tie to cash or jurisdictions.
- Additional bottlenecks can develop when there is poor version control across entities or jurisdictions, or when state packages are out of sync with federal changes.
And if you’re using spreadsheets built by someone who’s no longer with your company, your team could be left searching for clarity.
In short, relying on outdated provision processes and inefficient tools can cause a variety of workflow breakdowns – and expose tax teams to unnecessary risks.
How to accelerate ASC 740 disclosure workflows
Busy tax teams can optimize their disclosure workflows and solve common workflow challenges by using tax automation software. Although the provision process is complex, it’s perfect for automation – in part because it’s highly definable, rules-based, and data-driven.
By leveraging powerful software with trusted AI and tax research tools, corporate tax teams can automate complex calculations, seamlessly import data from various sources, and ensure compliance with tax laws and accounting standards.
How Bloomberg Tax can transform your provision process
Our integrated suite of trusted tools – designed by tax professionals for tax professionals – can help you work more efficiently and accurately with confidence.
Up-to-date tax law
Bloomberg Tax helps tax departments move with speed and certainty by applying AI technology to our trove of trusted, authoritative content. Rather than relying on synthesized summaries from unknown sources, our AI surfaces verified primary law and expert analysis from Bloomberg Tax Research – including the IRC, regulations, rulings, cases, Bloomberg Tax Portfolios, and Bloomberg Tax news. That foundation ensures tax calculations are grounded in trusted, defensible authority.
With advanced AI capabilities such as Deep Thinking – designed to handle complex, multi-step tax questions – teams can ask nuanced provision-related questions, receive clarifying follow-ups, and generate comprehensive, well-structured answers.
The result is faster issue resolution, reduced risk of errors or omissions, and the potential for impactful tax positions. Built-in transparency and authoritative citations provide traceability into how answers were generated, helping tax leaders confidently support their positions with auditors and stakeholders.
For example, a Fortune 500 company used Bloomberg Tax Research extensively at year-end when they sold their U.K. entities. The AI functionality helped them determine how to handle the U.K. tax basis related to AOCI and other equity items.
It helped them recharacterize the gain as GILTI income, allowing them to take a 250% deduction on about $80 million, providing savings of $7-8 million.
By integrating AI directly into a comprehensive tax research platform, Bloomberg Tax empowers tax professionals to stay current on changing laws, rules, and rates — so they can complete tax calculations more efficiently, accurately, and with confidence.
And with AI Assistant available within Bloomberg Tax Workpapers, users can navigate complex documentation and resolve tax law questions as they build and review workpapers.
Effective application
The combination of Bloomberg Tax Workpapers and Bloomberg Tax Provision helps teams solve challenges in three key areas of the provision process: data, controls, and calculations. To accelerate disclosure workflows, tax teams can leverage this tool’s tax-specific templates, automatic formula updates, and data transformation to keep schedules synced.
Bloomberg Tax Workpapers also improves transparency in your workflow by showing where numbers are coming from and doing data cleansing for you.
In addition, Bloomberg Tax Fixed Assets’ cloud-based software helps teams accurately track and monitor the complete fixed assets lifecycle with flexible integration capabilities. Tax teams use it to streamline disclosure workflows and efficiently conduct bonus depreciation calculations that import into workpapers.
Powerful automation
Bloomberg Tax Provision helps tax professionals forecast and accurately calculate their tax provisions, and it leverages a balance sheet approach to comply with U.S. GAAP. Using automation that saves time and reduces errors, it simplifies compliance and automatically runs ASC 740 tax provision calculations, applying adjustments to your rate rec and all other related schedules so they’re guaranteed to tie out.
Combined with Bloomberg Tax Workpapers, teams can automate data processes unique to tax, including trial balance cleansing, M-1 flux analyses, and period-over-period reconciliations.
Within the Workpapers spreadsheet experience, AI features are designed to help tax teams move faster without sacrificing accuracy or control.
For example:
- Workpapers Development Tracker Agent scans the workpaper context to surface recent topics and then supports follow-up Q&A through chat, so users spend less time hunting for updates and more time acting on what changed.
- Formula Builder Agent translates plain-language intent into Excel-like formulas – plus explains and debugs them – which cuts down on formula-writing time, reduces errors that can ripple into calculations, and makes workbooks easier to maintain and review over time.
Bloomberg Tax Workpapers’ Data Connect feature also saves time when updating workpapers for new versions of source data – simply replace the inputs and watch the data flow to connected workpapers.
Enhancements to Data Connect make workflow creation and iteration dramatically easier. The Instructions Generator lets users upload inputs and describe the desired outcome, then produces tailored, step-by-step guidance for building the workflow – simplifying what can otherwise be a complex design process and helping ensure the workflow is set up correctly the first time.
The Data Connect Workflow Builder goes further by turning that guidance into an interactive build experience: it validates each step block-by-block, adapts in real time, and helps users refine transformations as needs change.
Comprehensive documentation
Our integrated products make it possible to enrich your workpapers with trusted tax guidance contextualized to your company’s facts and circumstances.
Through an integration with Bloomberg Tax Research, Bloomberg Tax Workpapers makes it simple to ensure you are using the latest rates and tax law updates to inform your calculations. Built-in formulas will draw directly from primary sources and expert-verified information in Bloomberg Tax Research.
Results: Year-end with less rework
For tax teams, the end of the year is typically a busy time. And it’s even more intense now that corporate tax teams must reassess their strategies and adapt to the new tax landscape introduced by OBBBA and changes from ASU 2023-09.
By using Bloomberg Tax tools, corporate tax departments can modernize their workflows, tackle complex tasks with efficiency, and adapt to sweeping tax law change.
For example, our software helps teams minimize reconciliation errors and eliminate the “calc vs. footnote” drift that can occur with manual spreadsheets. And our automation tools reduce review cycles with audit-ready outputs.
“Bloomberg Tax Provision significantly reduced the time we spend on a provision,” said Sherri Throop, tax and financial reporting manager for Novo Building Products. Previously, Throop used a mammoth consolidated spreadsheet with tabs for each subsidiary – a tedious provision process that required her to navigate a series of underlying spreadsheets.
By using Bloomberg Tax Provision, she streamlined her workflow and overcame prior difficulties with getting manual equations and references across units to align and agree.
“I saved close to a month over the time it used to take working in Excel,” Throop said.
With Bloomberg Tax Provision’s time-saving automations in place, the tax director at a Fortune 500 electrical and mechanical services company freed up time to devote greater focus to interpreting results.
“That’s allowing me to come up with answers that the auditors – and my boss – are going to need without having to build something, figure it out, or dig through a bunch of reports,” the tax director said.
Request a demo of Bloomberg Tax’s powerful suite of solutions to see how much time your team could save at year-end.
Why automation and defensibility wins audits
In addition to streamlining your workflows and saving you time, trusted automation from Bloomberg Tax helps you build defensible tax positions in three key ways so that you can win audits.
- Automation to reduce manual errors: Bloomberg Tax Provision automates complex calculations for accurate provisions that always tie out. Our automated tools can efficiently handle rate reconciliation calculations. They calculate the impact of changes in tax rates on the tax provision and allow for real-time updates and adjustments to rates, which can be crucial when dealing with multiple tax jurisdictions.
- A full audit trail that provides transparency. Bloomberg Tax software includes a full audit trail and user permissions, so you can defend your work and have an accurate and transparent record of who did what – and when.
- Embedded intelligence to reduce risk. Our embedded intelligence features allow you to access Bloomberg Tax Research inside your workflows, so you don’t have to switch in and out of programs.
Build your year-end advantage with Bloomberg Tax
Our Bloomberg Tax tools not only integrate with each other – they also integrate with your existing systems to meet your tax provision needs. Because we connect critical tools and ensure smooth data flow, our tax suite eliminates redundancies and manual work.
This integration also improves accuracy and compliance, reduces risk, and enables a greater focus on strategic, high-value initiatives.
Ready to modernize your reporting, shorten closes, and raise your disclosure quality with our easy-to-use and integrated solutions? Request a demo.