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Writer's pictureJunaid Mirza

Will robots replace tax staff?

Despite the recent trend towards AI and machine learning, tax departments aren’t likely to be run by robots anytime soon. However, robotic processes in tax are quite valuable and can drive efficiencies in both cost and time economy.


Robotic Process Automation (RPA) simply gives us the ability to do more with the same resources. It allows tax staff to let go of the repetitive, tedious, and low-value tasks that take up the better portion of the day so that attention can be focused on more important things.


The shift away from mundane tasks enables optimized workflows and allows you to spend more time on planning and analysis, which is more accretive to shareholder value.


After implementing a robotic solution, what would tax people be doing?

Despite today’s available plug-ins and digital workflows, there are still a lot of repetitive, time-consuming processes involved in tax work. About 90 percent of a tax worker’s time is spent poring over spreadsheets, switching between software applications, and often re-entering the same values over and over for the same client.


However, robots are capable of doing the vast majority of the work that these highly skilled humans do. In fact, robots can accomplish these tasks far more quickly – and more accurately, too. Through rule-based processes, they can mimic the actions and interactions of their human counterparts and can even work across several software platforms—including ERPs, desktop applications, and even custom applications—distributing, validating, and processing data in the most efficient way possible.


Why RPA is a good thing for you

Highly qualified, highly paid tax staff should be working on more important things rather than tedious, repetitive tasks. By eliminating these processes from the human workflow, you can refocus on delivering results faster, more economically, and with of a more personal touch.


Why RPA is a good thing for tax staff

Tax staff spends a great deal of time poring over spreadsheets, updating, entering and re-entering data, writing macros, and identifying tiny calculation errors that throw your numbers out of balance. While some say they are cut out for this type of work, many tend to grow weary of it over time, meaning that the work will suffer as a result.


By implementing an RPA solution, you will be able to shift your efforts towards doing more engaging, rewarding, and important work. Job burnout will decrease, and job satisfaction will rise. Attrition will be greatly reduced, which will help you build a high-performance team that is capable of taking on more business while maintaining a high-quality output.


But is RPA right for tax

Until very recently, it didn’t make much sense to consider RPA unless you were dealing with high volume, repetitive tasks. While many tax compliance activities can be repetitive, they aren’t necessarily high volume, limiting the usefulness of RPA applications to primarily indirect tax—a high volume area of tax.


However, with businesses adopting RPA within the finance function the tax teams might have the ability to piggyback on the finance department’s infrastructure investment, making RPA suitable for even lower volume tax tasks. And as with all technologies, the cost of RPA implementation has been going down significantly as we gain more experience, making it worthwhile for tax departments to take a second look at how RPA can be deployed to create efficiencies.


Conclusion

An RPA solution provides many benefits. Automating mundane tasks reduces errors and the cost and frustration of fixing these errors. Successful deployment of RPA frees up time, allowing tax departments to focus on more higher value activities.


If you would like to learn more about how technology can empower your tax department, I would be happy to have a chat.

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