Today, many businesses are striving to operate on leaner budgets, thus outsourcing administrative tasks like accounting, tax compliance, secretarial services, and the likes – are becoming more attractive and typically provide a solution to reducing headcount and its associated recurring costs. Managing tax and statutory compliance in today’s complex economic and regulatory environment is not exactly an easy task.
Many SMEs struggle with balancing how much control they need to have on such internal activities and to what extent vis-a-vis simple peculiarities like how many internal tax resources are required versus if they can get more value from an external professional, at most times more experience and certainly with less supervision.
So the key question becomes, how much of it does an SME really need to control? If you don’t quite understand it, how much value can you add supervising it? Outsourcing particularly, your tax compliance to an accounting firm ensures effective management of your tax and statutory compliance, and ultimately always wins in the scale of which is the wiser?!
If you want to put your business in the best position to mitigate property tax risk, execute appeals successfully and reduce your overall cost of occupancy, outsourcing your commercial property tax management is a good decision because they help in managing and assisting in your operational matters that arise from your day-to-day activities such as establishing procedures and reporting practices, proactively communicating with company management, maintaining a corporate tax calendar, etc.
Additionally, they also help you in establishing effective communication protocols, serve as a tax liaison to external tax auditors and respond to tax inquiries from internal business units.
While managing your tax, outsourcing personnel ensures timely computations and provisions to allow for early requests on potential tax liabilities such that your cashflow is not put in a precarious situation and your business is always able to comply with all the appropriate laws and regulations.
In so many cases, companies use a tax data collection package to compile tax compliance data from local country controllers or regional tax personnel. The service provider [outsourcing firm] will have access to this data to prepare your tax returns.
Given the complexity of most ERP and other financial systems that support tax compliance, the accounting firm determines up front the types of information, where that data resides, what business rules apply to it, and what effort will be required to transform the data into a return-ready format.
Since, many compliance inefficiencies stem from inaccurate or incomplete data, it is critical to streamline and standardize the data collection, including non-ERP data, to ensure that the service provider has the information needed to prepare tax returns. Conversely, you also need to know that the service provider will make tax return information available to your company for tax planning purposes and to understand how it will be gathered, prepared, and delivered.
Running a business is quite challenging, taking care of back-office low added value tasks are often at the bottom of the priority list. Choosing a qualified outsourced accounting company is a great investment and a step towards a lower and higher value workload.
Our Outsourcing Programme, which covers either or a combination of HR, IT, CRM, Secretarial Services, Tax Compliance & Accounting is run under our SME Faculty. For more information on our Outsourcing Tax Compliance Support, send an email to smeblock@cr8careers.com
