What in the World is a “Tax Portal”?

Posted by Kelley LearcloseAuthor: Kelley Lear Name: Kelley Lear
Email: kelley.lear@redmoonsolutions.com
Site: http://blog.redmoonsolutions.com
About: Kelley is a member of the executive leadership team and leads our sales and marketing efforts at Red Moon Solutions. Kelley’s extensive experience in project management, product management, and consulting with Fortune 500 and Global 1000 clients is extremely important in this role.See Authors Posts (127) on Sep 29, 2011 | 0 comments

Finally…tax professionals are beginning to hear about and start to implement portal solutions for their tax departments!  I am so happy to hear this.  I was designing and implementing portal solutions some ten years ago…and these solutions have come along way in terms of technological advances, functionality, ease of use and reduction in cost.  Always a plus for cash strapped tax department budgets!  However, there are still so many tax professionals who have never heard of these solutions and/or are just not aware of what is possible in terms of these solutions for tax.   Unfortunately, tax is sometimes the last to have access to these more cutting edge technologies.  So, for those of you still scratching your heads and wondering, “what in the world is a tax portal?”…I thought I’d share a few thoughts.

Corporate portals really started gaining steam in the early 90′s.  Many of the early portals started out as “flat” or more static portals, which were straight aggregation and access solutions for business professionals.  This means that professionals could access various business links, internal tools and other internal network pages and tools from one central location.  As these solutions began to be used more effectively and technology advanced, they were able to begin to stream messages (internal and external), integrate other tools and dashboard reporting, business analytics, and much more dynamic content.  Today, in addition to targeted content aggregation, these solutions can integrate your business solutions, manage and track workflow, and facilitate the integration of data across applications.   Many stakeholders in a business process can access the same area and see tasks, documents and reminders that are specific to them.  Content and collaboration is specific and dynamic to the user.

A ”tax portal” just takes this to the next level for the tax professional.  A tax portal allows for finance, tax, tax services consultants and other internal and external folks, to share data and communicate about specific financial and tax data, data requests and other reconciliation functions throughout the provision, compliance and audit cycles.  In other words, comprehensive, structured and transparent communication and data sharing.  Most tax portal technology also allows for full document management like that which you would find in Sharepoint, Documentum and other generic document management systems, but would have document “tagging” and taxonomy that makes the tax professionals’ lives much easier. This is all without having to custom code these attributes into the system.  For example, tax professionals care about things like tax year/fiscal year, period, legal entity structures, location, jurisdiction, business units/profit centers, tax type, adjustment type, etc.  These items are typically ”out of the box” in a tax portal solution, so that the end user can track, store and retrieve documents, issues, notices, tax workpapers and other supporting documents in a multi-dimensional and much more efficient manner.  Other solutions may even be sophisticated enough to have integrated tax calendars and audit management functionality!  Thought I’d share my top ten things to look for in a tax portal solution:

1. True “Software as a Service” (SaaS) or “Cloud Computing Solution”.  Completely web-based and accessible 24X7 to tax teams domestically and around the globe.
2. Secure access to internal and external stakeholders such as auditors, revenue agents, consultants or tax preparers.
3. Pricing – pay ONLY for what you need and want.  You need to be able to get budget for this solution!
4. Easy to use import and export functionality.
5. Able to integrate easily with other systems, data sources and websites.
6. Completely end user customizable!!!
7. Does not require deep IT skills or expensive consulting resources to ‘customize’ or make changes to the portal.  This includes:  dashboards, tabs, field names, meta data tagging, drop down boxes, workflow and much, much, more!
8. Can be used across all tax types, Federal/State Income Tax, Franchise, Sales & Use, Payroll, Property, etc. as well as other related teams such as internal and external audit, finance, accounting, treasury, regulatory and statutory teams and legal.  Standard taxonomies and “Best Practices” for fields and metadata are “out of the box” and further configurable.
9. Comprehensive notices and Audit Room functionality that manages workflow, data points, metadata, documents and requests from audit through appeals across all tax types.  Also includes secure monitored access to external audit teams and revenue agents if desired.
10. Top notch performance in searching, running reports, updating and exporting.   It’s all about PERFORMANCE!

Check out our eTaxPortal for more ideas.  Let me know if you have additional questions.  I would love to hear and respond…