In recent years a number of technology products have come to the UK market to assist with tax reporting. Whilst such software products are relatively new offerings for UK outbound groups US groups and their overseas subsidiaries have been using this type of software for a number of years. At first sight it is perhaps not obvious why multinational organisations would need to buy specialist tax reporting software given that they will have perfectly functional financial consolidation systems that produce the rest of the accounts so what makes tax different?
A financial consolidation system typically uses very rigid data entry ‘forms’ to collect information from local controllers. The focus of these systems is to collect the key numbers for the financial statements rather than detailed explanations behind those numbers and whilst a normal ERP system may well have a million or more line items against which accounting entries...
