What’s the Best Software for Tax Professionals?

Types of software for tax professionals

Corporate tax leaders across all industries are looking for ways to simplify their tax and financial reporting workflows with tools that reduce risk, save time, and increase accuracy. There are various types of tax software that these teams should consider, but the ideal solution involves integrated automation tools that improve sharing data and information across tax processes.

Tax research platforms

To make informed decisions on tax matters, it’s essential to rely on substantial authority, such as relevant case law, IRS rulings, and expert analyses, to support your tax position. This requires ongoing federal tax research involving continuous monitoring of legislative changes, administrative guidance, judicial decisions, and global developments that shape corporate tax strategies.

Now more than ever, an authoritative tax research product isn’t just useful – it’s indispensable. A platform like Bloomberg Tax Research offers:

• Real-time updates on state, federal, and international tax matters, with links to primary sources to help you work faster, stay compliant, reduce risk, and provide better service
• Comprehensive expert analyses, ensuring tax departments don’t overlook critical details that could lead to financial penalties, noncompliance, or missed opportunities for tax savings
• AI-enabled tools that quickly surface the most relevant tax laws, rulings, and commentary, saving you hours of research time
• Integrated tax products – including Bloomberg Tax Fixed Assets, Provision, and Workpapers – to transform disjointed, manual processes into a seamless workflow and provide intelligence exactly where you need it

[For more guidance on selecting the right tax research solution for your tax team, download our Buyer’s Guide to Tax Research Software.]

Tax provision software

Traditionally, many organizations relied on Excel to carry out complex ASC 740 tax provision calculations. The slightest data entry error, omission, or inconsistency can result in inaccurate calculations – or hours spent combing through complex spreadsheets to find the problem.

With the right tool, you don’t have to rely on manual methods that become error-prone and inefficient as your business scales and tax scenarios become more complicated.

Bloomberg Tax Provision is a smart solution that can automate tax provision calculations and ASC 740 compliance. Key functionalities include:

• It automatically runs the ASC 740 tax provision calculations on your data as soon as it’s entered and applies the adjustments to the rate rec and all other related schedules so calculations are guaranteed to tie out, helping close quickly and confidently.
• The software has the ability to download provision calculations and robust reports into Excel, including formulas for ease of review and traceability.
• It provides a complete audit trail that records each change to the provision throughout its life.
• Multiple users can work on tax provision concurrently with audit trail, sign-off, and provision locks.
• Integration with Bloomberg Tax Workpapers enables automated M-adjustments that update whenever there is a new trial balance available

Fixed assets management software

Tax and accounting professionals face increasing demands to process and report on fixed assets with precision and speed. Fixed assets software is designed to simplify this, providing tools to manage depreciation, ensure regulatory compliance, and produce accurate reports with minimal manual effort.

Bloomberg Tax Fixed Assets is a comprehensive solution designed to automate the tracking, depreciation calculations, and tax compliance of fixed assets. It helps tax professionals manage asset lifecycles and adjustments while ensuring compliance with ever-changing tax regulation. When it’s coupled with Bloomberg Tax Workpapers, you can accelerate depreciation modeling processes by transforming data and automating asset tracking and depreciation.

Key features include:

• It is automatically updated, with built-in federal and state laws ensuring accurate calculations.
• The software integrates with source and compliance systems to automate much of the fixed asset management process.
• The cloud-based solution provides flexibility and performance with the ability to handle up to 99 books and an unlimited number of assets.
• It offers out of the box standard reports and the ability to easily create custom reports for management.

Tax workpapers software

Workpapers are the underpinning of every core corporate tax workflow, with most of the challenging quantitative work in a corporate tax department occuring in its workpapers. Yet, this critical part of the tax workflow is underserved by existing solutions, which results in most of this work taking place entirely in Excel.

However, Excel lacks the controls that are critical to the tax and accounting function. Cleansing data, an essential first step to preparing a workpaper, is manual and repetitive in Excel, and time spent wrangling data is time not spent applying the tax law and identifying and mitigating risks in the calculations.

Bloomberg Tax Workpapers revolutionizes the tax workpapers process with a powerful combination of data prep, spreadsheets, integrated tax guidance, and controls – purpose-built for tax professionals.

Key functionalities include:

• Automated roll forward capabilities that minimize errors by eliminating manual steps such as copy-pasting and updating formulas from period to period
• Standardized tax calculation templates for complex or newly changed tax laws, complete with embedded citations to primary sources
• Instant access to AI-generated answers sourced from relevant tax law documents and trusted Bloomberg Tax analyses
• Strong internal controls to maintain accuracy and consistency, and minimize audit risk

Integrated tax solutions are the right choice

As savvy tax professionals know, manual processes (such as using Microsoft Excel for complicated tax calculations) are time-intensive and prone to errors and other compliance risks. But with automation, busy teams can streamline their workflows, reduce errors, and reclaim valuable time that can be better spent on strategic, high-value tasks.

That said, automation that uses disparate systems – including those that are separated within an enterprise or outsourced to other entities – can have its own challenges, including a lack of efficiency.

So, an integrated suite of solutions is the best automation for tax professionals because it stitches the tax automation process together and reduces the risk of errors, making it easier for the tax department to own and manage all moving parts.

[Read about the 6 Tax Processes You Can (and Should) Automate to save time, minimize risks, and increase flexibility in your tax workflow.]

What are the benefits of integrated tax solutions?

Integrated tax software offers a variety of benefits for tax professionals, including automating tedious work, minimizing risk, and freeing up time to do more strategic work.

Additional functional benefits include:

Accurate and updated tax calculations

Integrated software solutions offer more accurate calculations across the board, because the use of automation results in the reduced potential for human error. Plus, a trusted software solution also can account for the latest changes in federal and state tax laws within the solution itself (so you don’t have to exit your workflow to do time-intensive tax research).

For example, the Bloomberg Tax suite of integrated tools transforms disjointed systems and manual calculations into a single, seamless workflow, backed by the power of AI. Sitting at the crux of our suite is Bloomberg Tax Workpapers, a first-of-its kind solution that preps your data automatically and integrates with the rest of our best-in-class software, including Bloomberg Tax Provision, Fixed Assets, and Research.

Bloomberg Tax Workpapers updates all your calculations with the latest federal and state tax laws and includes explanations of any changes that are pulled from our research product. For example, if you need to calculate state taxable income, Bloomberg Tax Workpapers makes it easy with custom formulas that return what the weighting is for each state.

And if new laws are implemented that change your applicable tax rate for the period, the updated rate will pull in automatically. For multinational companies, you can also pull in foreign rates for all your entities.

Watch Bloomberg Tax Senior Vice President of Product Evan Croen showcase how trusted tax intelligence is embedded at the point of application. (5:07)

Seamless reporting and compliance

Compliance has been at the center of the tax process for decades, and for good reason. It’s an important and highly scrutinized output of the tax function. But it’s possible to streamline the work that comes before that process – and integrated automation tools can help.

For example, to ensure you never miss a filing, you can upload your entity details on Bloomberg Tax’s Compliance Tracker – a feature of Bloomberg Tax Research – and watch it automatically generate the required forms, due dates, and administrative guidance.

In addition, with nonintegrated processes, roll forward will inevitably take up a lot of your time because you need to gather, validate, and reconcile extensive financial data from various sources. But with automated roll forward capabilities, there’s no need to upload anything new year-over-year.

With Bloomberg Tax Workpapers, simply select which workpaper you want and the year you want to roll forward to. Then, let the data transformation feature – built specifically for the tax use case – pull in the data from the relevant period. Basically, with a click of a button, the integrated software automatically handles this cumbersome process for you.

When you save and publish the results, the new roll forward workpaper will provide a summary of everything that was done to the workpaper, and all of the values will be automatically updated with the new data source.

Bloomberg Tax product manager Ellen Barker walks through use cases for time-saving automation capabilities. (2:00)

Faster tax research

Tax research can be a time-consuming endeavor. But integrated AI tools help you get answers to questions directly within your workflow – along with access to expert tax guidance.

For example, with Bloomberg Tax Workpapers, if you have any questions as you’re working in your spreadsheet, you can use our embedded AI Q&A service. Just type in your question, and an AI-generated response will be populated, based on trusted and vetted Bloomberg Tax content.

With this kind of integrated tax solution, you no longer need to read through long analyses to find the answers you’re looking for. Instead, the AI-powered tool by Bloomberg Tax produces a synopsis and identifies the source material so you can do deeper research if desired.

Streamlined workflows and less reliance on manual data

Manual data entry has a variety of risks – in addition to taking a great deal of time from overburdened tax departments. So, instead of spending time on manual data entry, an integrated suite of tools can streamline your workflow.

The integration between Bloomberg Tax Workpapers and Bloomberg Tax Provision allows you to easily calculate M-adjustments. Instead of having to do these updates manually whenever there’s new trial balance data available, our integrated software lets you efficiently and easily automate them with a click of a button.

Bloomberg Tax Product Manager Chris Little explains how you can take your data farther with integrated products. (2:16)