How to Automate Tax Workflows With Tax Workpaper Software
Tax workflows simplified
Most tax departments focus tirelessly on final deliverables while neglecting inefficiencies in their foundational processes. With constantly changing regulations and increasing workloads, this outdated approach leaves teams vulnerable to errors and wasted time.
Forward-thinking professionals are reimagining their workflows by leveraging tax workpaper software that simplifies, automates, and optimizes every stage of the tax process. Bloomberg Tax Workpapers is a best-in-class solution designed to save you time, enhance compliance, and significantly improve your entire workflow.
Tax automation topics
Tax Automation Software Guide
AI for Tax Professionals
Fixed Assets Automation
Tax Provision Automation
A better way to work(paper)
Transform how you manage tax workflows with Bloomberg Tax Workpapers – designed to eliminate inefficiencies, reduce errors, and set your tax team up for long-term success.
For too long, tax departments have designed their processes with a focus on compliance activities while leaving the core parts of their tax calculation workflow untouched – and unimproved. Now, savvy tax teams are investing in tax automation software to streamline processes and transform their workflows to go beyond compliance and instead focus on optimizing their tax position.
In this guide, we explore the various ways that automating your tax workpapers can save time, reduce manual errors, and simplify compliance by noticeably improving your team’s entire workflow – from data prep to cell-level review tracking.
What are tax workpapers?
Tax workpapers are essential documents that provide evidence to support figures on your corporate tax return. They play a pivotal role in audits, compliance, and overall accuracy within all major tax deliverables – from financial statements to tax filings.
This documentation helps ensure tax professionals are working with the most accurate and comprehensive tax and accounting information. Workpapers are used for various tax forms and calculations, including:
- Tax credits
- State and federal taxable income
- M-1 adjustments
- Corporate AMT
- Subpart F income
- GILTI income
According to an Accounting Today and Bloomberg Tax survey of corporate tax professionals:
- 89% of respondents said their current workpapers process is difficult.
- 92% of respondents said their existing process is overly time-consuming.
Tax workpaper templates
The IRS doesn’t specify a particular format or template for workpapers. Over the years, tax professionals have developed their own tax calculation spreadsheets, often involving significant research and manual calculation updates. While workpapers are essential, collecting and preparing them can be labor-intensive and risky – especially for those still wrestling with outdated tools such as Excel spreadsheets.
Bloomberg Tax Workpapers replaces messy Excel files with clean, highly customizable templates that offer clarity and efficiency. Whether you’re onboarding a new team or rolling forward to a new tax year, seamless workflows keep everything running smoothly.
With built-in formulas and logic reflecting the latest tax regulations, Workpapers ensures every calculation meets compliance standards and eliminates risk due to outdated or incorrect spreadsheets. Integration with Bloomberg Tax Research also ensures easy access to the latest guidance, keeping you compliant without additional effort, including an AI-powered feature that allows users to ask questions about the relevant rules and get easy-to-understand answers with linked citations.
Tax workpaper software vs. Excel
Many tax professionals have always used Excel for their workpapers. While they may be familiar and widely used, they can make managing workflows and controlling data entries much more difficult.
Corporate tax professionals identified five top challenges of tax workpapers:
- Manually prepping data for use in workpapers
- Updating calculations for multiple versions of source data
- Keeping calculations up to date with the latest tax law
- Identifying risks to efficiently target areas of review
- Sufficiently supporting your tax positions and calculations with explanations, primary or secondary authority, etc.
Most of these challenges exist due to the reliance on technology that wasn’t built for tax use cases. Excel has long been a staple for tax and accounting professionals, but when you compare its limitations to tax workpaper software, the difference is clear.
Excel can be tedious, prone to human error, and devoid of audit controls and repeatability. When you use Excel to prepare workpapers, you may spend valuable hours manually gathering data and decoding calculations – only to worry that you’re not in line with the latest tax laws and rates. Excel functionality often relies on macro-based automation or extensive, complex formula-based automation, which is decidedly archaic in comparison to today’s technological innovations.
By implementing specialized tax workpaper software, tax teams gain more than just automation – they unlock immediate benefits that impact the entire organization. By streamlining processes, reducing the risk of errors, and enhancing controls, this technology empowers teams to achieve greater efficiency and accuracy.
Advantages of tax workpaper software
Bloomberg Tax Workpapers software is purpose-built to address complex tax calculations by leveraging automation and advanced tax-specific functions to streamline the entire process.
Key integrations with the entire Bloomberg Tax suite of solutions helps tax professionals seamlessly handle all stages of the tax process and reduce the need for disparate systems and manual processes.
These are some of the key benefits you can expect when incorporating tax workpaper software into your operations:
Save time and minimize errors
Tax workpaper software automates manual data entry and other repetitive tasks, reducing human error and saving your team valuable time. Automation ensures faster, more accurate tax calculations with built-in controls to ensure your work meets audit standards, freeing up resources for higher-priority tasks like analysis and planning.
Stay compliant with ever-changing tax regulations
Keeping up with constantly changing tax laws is a major challenge for corporate tax functions. Tax workpaper software simplifies compliance by automatically updating to reflect the latest tax laws and rates. With compliance tasks streamlined, your team can focus on analyzing data and identifying risks, rather than managing arduous compliance tasks.
Improve collaboration and enhance team productivity
Tax workpaper software provides comprehensive oversight and control over every spreadsheet. With cell-level review tracking, users can identify when a value changes and who reviewed it, ensuring accuracy and accountability. Features such as automatic saving, workbook-level sign-offs, and a progress dashboard eliminate concerns about late entries or last-minute adjustments. Real-time updates and complete visibility empower professionals to manage workpapers with confidence and precision.
Optimize workflow efficiency
By automating routine and manual tax preparation tasks, workpaper software enables tax teams to instead focus on high-value activities that help them be a strategic partner to the business. This streamlined approach accelerates turnaround times, enhances productivity, and improves overall operational efficiency.
What makes Bloomberg Tax Workpapers unique?
Bloomberg Tax Workpapers stands apart by addressing key pain points in three critical areas: data, controls, and calculations. It combines the familiarity of Excel spreadsheets with tax-specific functionality to automate, simplify, and accelerate your workflows.
Here are six examples of tax processes that can be automated with Bloomberg Tax Workpapers:
1. Automated roll forwards
Automating the roll forward process with Bloomberg Tax Workpapers minimizes manual effort, reduces errors, and saves time by intelligently updating workpapers with new period data. The built-in data transformation feature automatically pulls relevant data, identifies and adjusts formulas, updates values, and generates a comprehensive summary of changes, providing tax preparers a jump-start on the new workpaper. Reviewers can easily verify the updates, ensuring accuracy and confidence.
2. Direct data input
Managing tax data from various ERP systems or teams with inconsistent formats can lead to errors and inefficiencies. Bloomberg Tax Workpapers streamlines the process by integrating directly with data sources, using secure file transfer protocols (SFTP) to pull and transform ERP and general ledger data into usable formats. The built-in automation eliminates the need to recreate yearly manual data cleanup steps, reducing repetitive work before tax calculations and creating a repeatable process, even as your organization grows and data volumes increase.
3. Optimized calculations
Bloomberg Tax Workpapers streamlines the process of pulling data into tax workpapers by using data connections to link source data directly into calculations. This feature simplifies long and complex formulas, making it easier to review and maintain even large workbooks with 50 or more links. Users can replace source files for updates or roll forward to the next period without redoing work, saving significant time and improving efficiency for tax professionals handling complex data.
4. Tax law compliance
The latest rates and tax law updates from Bloomberg Tax Research are built into standardized calculation templates, eliminating the need for external research. Our solution puts critical tax information right where you need it to ensure accuracy and confidence, with embedded citations to primary source guidance and links to deeper analysis when needed.
5. Change management and tracking
Bloomberg Tax Workpapers integrates the flexibility of spreadsheets with robust controls to simplify compliance and auditing processes. With features such as cell-level change tracking, users can manage edits with detailed records of who made changes, what was changed, and when. This reduces the risk of manual errors and unintended modifications. Plus, document sign-off provides a clear audit trail with multilevel approvals, ensuring last-minute edits are flagged for review to maintain accuracy and compliance, even under SOX audit standards.
6. Comprehensive tax management
Bloomberg Tax Workpapers simplifies the entire tax workflow by seamlessly integrating with Bloomberg Tax Provision and Bloomberg Tax Fixed Assets to ensure data consistency and efficiency. With smooth data transfers and the ability to export to Excel, it offers flexibility for use with third-party tax preparation tools. These powerful features deliver reliability and confidence in managing tax compliance and calculations.
Upgrade your spreadsheets with Bloomberg Tax Workpapers
Investing in specialized tax automation software is an investment in efficiency, accuracy, and long-term success. By automating data transformation, simplifying compliance measures, enhancing controls, and streamlining workflows with powerful features and seamless integration, Bloomberg Tax Workpapers saves time and reduces errors while unlocking benefits that impact the entire organization.
Don’t let outdated tools hold back your tax team. Request a demo to experience the difference for yourself.