Solutions

Tax Planning

With the Boardwalk Collaboration Platform (BCP), Tax firms can enable a rich Excel workbook- based solution that delivers the flexibility of Excel with the central control and process management capabilities of BCP.  BCP provides the transformational technology that enables Tax firms to convert their manual spreadsheet-based processes into data-managed, enterprise-quality applications reducing costs and risk and building competitive advantage.

Tax Planning – Challenges

Tax planning today is a very complex operation that involves collection of data from diverse clients with a myriad of variations in business structure and tax implications.  To manage the process, the Tax Firm has to create the appropriate project environments for workpaper creation and management and tax preparation and review.  In a large firm, there are thousands of client projects, thousands of tax lines, lots of variation, and thousands of preparers.  And each year the rules will change and the data must be rolled over to the following year's returns.

Most firms today are using a combination of Excel workbooks, databases, file sharing technologies like SharePoint, and XML to stitch together solutions to this complex problem space.  This approach produces high maintenance, programmer intensive solutions that are difficult to scale.  Some of the challenges include:

  • Very Limited access to data - data is not easily accessible for integration or for analytics and reporting across files (for example, it would be very difficult to extract the Income Statement from 10,000 Excel tax workbooks)
  • Processes are error prone due to file linkages where files depend on other files to pull data (example: tax consolidation processes)
  • No way to easily manage templates versus instances; for example propagating a new business rule out to a 1,000 instances can’t be done without an arduous manual process
  • Technology limitations force a “one size fits all” approach to workbook creation leading to large, cumbersome workbooks with poor usability. Unable to support, for example, a balance sheet template for one customer that has 400 tax lines whereas another has 60
  • Can’t work without checking out files and locking others out
  • Changes made by one participant working in isolation are not easily shared with others; and there’s no audit trail of changes which supports cell, row, or entire spreadsheet change history and comparatives
  • Solutions involving XML require programmer intervention and don’t scale because of data location dependencies

Ultimately, the firms are subject to:

  • High development and maintenance costs -  in some cases, every client engagement requires development and maintenance intervention
  • Suboptimal resource alignment – senior resources doing junior resource work because of data management challenges
  • Delays in getting at the data – can’t get to the data easily since the “data” is stored as Excel or document files resulting in delayed responsiveness to the customer
  • Poor usability and efficiency – as workbooks grow more complex, size and scalability become issues; attempts to use web-form based solutions or xml based data manipulation are ineffective
  • Risk to the firm – errors, delays, and lack of auditability put firms at major risk

 The Boardwalktech Solution – BCP for Tax Planning Operations

The capabilities of BCP are all derived from the patented tabular data management "Cuboid" technology at the heart of the product.  The traditional file model is replaced by managing cells and ranges of cells as SQL objects in a relational database.  Some of the key distinctions include:

  • Data Managed versus File based
    • BCP runs on top of a standard relational database environment
    • BCP supports a persistent tabular data environment, so every change to every cell is captured and versioned; data and formulae are shared through the database
    • Historical data by cell, row or table are available at the click of a button – who made the change and when
  • Data addressability
    • Once a workbook is enabled in BCP, the data is available for integration, analytics and reporting
    • What currently is an arduous task to pull data from multiple workbooks, parse it, and manipulate it, can be done on the server in BCP with SQL calls; data consolidations across multiple large workbook environments run in seconds
  •  “Isolation/Sharing” User Model
    • Work off-line in Excel doing local saves until ready to share your changes or see your updates – then “submit/refresh” to share with others
    • Multiple people can work with the data without check-out – data is synched; conflicts managed (a check-out model can also be supported where desired)
    • Workflow is built into the process with approvals, exception handling, etc.
  • Template Management
    • Templates or the “Excel containers” are managed through BCP separate from the instances of those templates
    • Templates can also be updated through the “submit/refresh” action – for example, if a subject matter expert adds a new column or business rule to a template, the changes are propagated to all of the instances
    • This puts the creation and maintenance of templates and business rules in the hands of the users and subject matter experts and reduces the dependency on developers
  • Security Model
    • Entitlements and security are managed to the cell level, are centrally managed by the super-user, and can be changed on-demand; integrates with existing security models
    • BCP is much more secure than opening a spreadsheet across the internet or emailing spreadsheets (because of net change update)
  • Performance
    • Can scale to thousands of users with minimal IT footprint -  no need to hold open user sessions since users work in isolation doing local saves until ready to share; submit/refresh generates net change transaction over the internet or private network
    • Optimizes workbook size by supporting dynamic sizing of sheets based on customer specific parameters (e.g., number of divisions, entities, partners, or other taxonomies) – thereby eliminating “one size fits all” workbook designs

 BCP Benefits for Tax Firms

  • Reduce Development & Maintenance Costs – Reduction of the heavy use of IT developers for project creation and maintenance; development work shifts to subject matter experts; preparation and updates made by business people
  • Better alignment of resource skill sets with task complexity – get the right resources working on the right tasks
  • Improve Usability and Efficiency - Align workbook with task size eliminating the “one size fits all” approach; preserve the Excel user experience, speed the performance of workbooks, and handle preparation and review faster
  • Increase Client Responsiveness - Handle more difficult, complex projects quickly to win more business, as well as to deliver projects in record time
  • Enable Client Collaboration – share data with the client without email, in a secure, auditable manner
  • Improve data accessibility -  enable access to the data without opening the files; run consolidations in seconds; automatically drive rollover; provide process analytics capabilities through access to cross project data and metrics
  • Reduce Risk to Firm -  reduce critical errors, ensure accurate workbooks with latest business rules; capture all changes at a cell level for auditability

Comparisons between BCP and other Technologies for Tax Data

The chart below summarizes some of the differences between BCP and other application technologies.