Are your tax data already delivering valuable insights?

Are you already using the data that your tax department generates? Tax data offer valuable information, insights, and opportunities for the rest of your business. Compliance and tax professionals can add much more value than is often thought. Currently, the focus is often on the timely preparation and submission of tax returns. How do you ensure that your compliance process generates relevant insights from your company's tax data? PwC experts Stan Berings and Sabine Barlage provide the answer.

Departments that look beyond just complying with laws and regulations and the timely preparation and submission of tax returns create value for the entire organisation. This value may not be immediately tangible in the form of returns. However, when tax insights are integrated into your broader business strategy, they contribute to, for example, investment decisions, plans for future transactions, or the shaping of new business models. 

Tax data and analysis can also provide insight into tax risks and help your company identify opportunities, for example, as a result of changes in laws and regulations. In the current complex tax environment, these intangible contributions are of crucial importance. The tax function is increasingly becoming a strategic player within your organisation.

Technology offers opportunities in the face of a shortage of people and resources

To be able to fulfil this strategic role, the tax function must have the right technology, sufficient resources, and especially enough of the right staff. The right technology because tax departments are increasingly working with real-time data and thus can generate real-time insights. The right staff because working with new technologies and interpreting data requires the right skills. The demand for people with these skills is high, while the supply is small. Here, technology can possibly help to automate processes. However, investing in technology and talent costs money. Not just in acquisition and attracting them, but also in maintaining and retaining them. 

To enhance the role of the tax and compliance function, two things are essential:

• recognising the power of quality data, and
• investing in the necessary skills and technology to gain insights from that data.

A platform for your entire tax compliance and reporting landscape 

New tools can create intuitive data visualisations and powerful analyses that bring new insights and business opportunities to light. Instead of multiple solutions with different implementation methods and interfaces, we hear from our clients that they are looking for better integrated tax tools. Our response to this is the introduction of Sightline: one platform that brings together multiple tax technologies and thus provides you with an integrated, comprehensive overview of all tax processes and projects. 

With Sightline, you gain insight into your complete tax compliance and reporting landscape. This way, you are able to generate valuable insights from your tax data and discover new opportunities for your business.

Video: Dealing with the increasing complexity of compliance and regulatory pressure

We recently conducted a survey among a number of organisations about the future of the tax function. In the video below, PwC experts Sabine Barlage and Stan Berings discuss some notable results.