Case Study
Novo Building Products Trades Complicated Spreadsheets for Simplicity and Accuracy with Bloomberg Tax Provision
- Rapid growth through acquisition, followed by a consolidation of brands, made tax reporting and planning more complicated
- Multiple-spreadsheet approach was difficult to manage
- Bloomberg Tax Provision
- Deploying a system that is “self-contained, simple, powerful, and efficient”
[Learn how you can solve technical and process issues involved in calculating your income tax provision with Bloomberg Tax Provision.]
Challenge: Solve complications created by growth through acquisition
Novo Building Products is an industry-leading manufacturer and distributor of mouldings, stair parts, doors, and other specialty building products, serving building material dealers, retail home centers, and other places where builders and homeowners find the products that make a house into a home. Through growth by acquisition and a subsequent consolidation of brands, tax reporting and planning have become more complicated.
Sherri Throop, tax and financial reporting manager, joined Novo Building Products in 2016 via their Empire Company brand, a moulding and millwork distributor. One of the challenges that Throop ran into was the tax provision process. The process required a mammoth consolidated spreadsheet with tabs for each subsidiary; each filled with its own accounting by revenue source and area of operations fed through a series of underlying spreadsheets for each company. In her own words, “this approach made it difficult to consolidate and integrate information, raising issues with getting equations and references across units to align and agree.”
Throop labored to tame the spreadsheet. While learning the intricacies and quirks of their homegrown solution, she began searching online, certain there must be a better way to manage the critical function of creating their tax provision.
Solution: Software that provides great value and is easy to install and use
Throop found a variety of tax provision solutions, many quite expensive and clearly targeted at companies many times the size of Novo Building Products. Then she found Bloomberg Tax Provision.
“I arranged a demo of Bloomberg Tax Provision, and I have to say, I was blown away. You can get a complicated and hard-to-deploy solution for a significant investment – and we looked at those. Or you can get Bloomberg Tax Provision, which provides great value with a reasonable investment, and is easy to install and use.”
Throop and her colleagues were impressed, not just by the software solution, but also by how well Bloomberg Tax Provision’s approach to implementation, onboarding, and ongoing support fit Novo’s needs.
“Other tax provision solution providers want far more information in the system than is necessary,” Throop says. “They end up doing all the set up for you and make you go through formal training. Bloomberg Tax Provision is more practical [for a medium-sized company with a modest tax and accounting team].”
“I’ve worked with tax software my entire career, and this program is a gem. It’s self-contained, simple, powerful, and efficient. Bloomberg Tax Provision does the prep right the first time. I can’t say enough good things about it.”
Results: Increasing accuracy, while reducing risk
Bloomberg Tax Provision has been the answer that Throop and Novo Building Products were looking for.
Accurate – “It’s a great product. It handles all sorts of calculations, more precisely and consistently through every last number than I could have done in Excel – it significantly reduces the risk of formula errors which saves time on the review process.”
Manages Risk and Scales – “Any real-world business has layers of complexity that Bloomberg Tax Provision handles smoothly, which homegrown spreadsheets just can’t. State taxes – I would drive myself crazy trying to keep the apportionment calculations for each state reasonable, and now, Bloomberg Tax Provision not only does it all for me but significantly increases the precision of the calculations.”
Smooth During Change – “We recently consolidated companies, from 20 down to four. If it hadn’t been for Bloomberg Tax Provision, it would have been somewhere between impossible and me pulling my hair out.”
Throop nets it out, noting that with her most recent provision: “I didn’t have any questions from the auditors this year … not one. That speaks for itself.”
The journey to such an outstanding outcome was seamless. Throop has particular praise for Bloomberg Tax Provision’s focus on helping users realize value quickly with online resources.
“The lengths Bloomberg Tax Provision goes to in order to codify their onboarding process makes it easy to watch and replicate in your office,” Throop says. “I’m a visual person. When you show me something, I get it, and that’s what I get from the videos.”
She continues, emphasizing that even as a new user, Novo felt confident in its use of the technology thanks to the online training offered but also because of the software’s architecture and intuitive user interface. “Bloomberg Tax Provision took a complicated thing and made it simple for the user. The system double-checks for you and won’t call it good until you’ve satisfied every condition, which they make easy with step-by-step instructions.”
[Bloomberg Tax Provision is the most powerful ASC 740 calculation engine on the market. See it for yourself.]
Bloomberg Tax Provision also makes sharing data simple, anticipating needs and staying on top of reporting requirements so that auditors have everything they need to answer their questions and allow them to file their reports easily.
Throop says, “I click a button and get 13 different reports to print simultaneously. Three of those are for footnotes in the format that we need. I sent these reports to the auditors this year and didn’t do anything else – and they didn’t even ask me any questions. They understood what they were looking at because each sheet contains all the math, so the auditors can trace where every number comes from … all with one button.”
Throop also cites the time she saves, limiting overtime and stress. “Bloomberg Tax Provision significantly reduced the time we spend on a provision. I saved close to a month over the time it used to take working in Excel. Excess time was spent each year in Excel due to changes in the company structure requiring editing or creating new spreadsheets and testing formulas to be sure all changes were accounted for and proper. I didn’t work anywhere near the hours I have in the past. That’s worth a lot to me.”
Overall, Throop said:
“I’ve worked with tax software my entire career, and this program is a gem. It’s self-contained, simple, powerful, and efficient. Bloomberg Tax Provision does all the prep right the first time. I can’t say enough good things about it.”