According to Business Finance¹, tax or finance departments actually only need a piece of the massive amounts of data on offer. Forget quantity — what you’re after here is quality. With tax laws and regulations changing every year, make sure you’re up to date on the latest rules. There is a potentially large amount of data to go through, so you’re going to want to automate things as much as possible. Tax determination software will help, and you want to make sure you choose one that has ETL (extract-transform-loadtools) to consolidate taxation data stored in multiple systems and integrate it with the annual changes to tax law.

Once you have all that raw data collected, you’ll need business intelligence software to apply analytics and arrange it all into an easy-to-read dashboard. The data is lurking in disparate places, and business intelligence software will help pull it into a central repository to be analyzed. Some companies are even building apps in order to support their business intelligence products. Though these tools were created to monitor data from multiple sources, be careful that you don’t choose a BI system so complex that it is impossible to use with ease, requiring extra money to be spent on continuing training. You want a business intelligence system that can be simply and quickly accessed, and integrates well with your legacy systems, so you don’t miss important details on your business taxes.