Speedos and Margaritas – A Guide to Preparing Your Tax Return in the Fast Lane

With the September 15^th corporate filing deadline looming in the not too far horizon, tis the time that many fellow accountants reevaluate the career paths that they so nobly chose in college. Your parents assured you umpteen years ago, that a career in taxes is as secure as Michael Phelps’ Speedo during the 400 IM (please let this analogy hold up on Mr. Phelps’ end – all puns intended). While that may be true, what was so graciously omitted from the “be an accountant” propaganda was the tireless hours and stress that would ultimately ensue each year during the year-end close and compliance busy season. Ah, but wait…what about the promises of sipping margarita’s on the beach during the “off season?” Well okay, fine…tequila consumption may increase exponentially following September 15^th, but sadly the recovery period lasts all but a week. The “off season” draws to its typical abrupt end and you find yourself being beat over the head with all 73,608 pages of the Standard Tax Reporter once again. So how can we take back our lives? By working smarter – not harder.

Being a recovering CPA, I can assure you that there is help out there. It was only a year ago, I found myself closing in on a 2 am night – staring incoherently at a stacks of superseded 1120’s thinking how comfy it would be to use as a pillow. In those moments of pure defeat I promised myself that the following year would be different. No more fire drills. No more 2 am nights. No more eating Jimmy Johns seven nights a week at my desk. Well, this compliance season I finally kept that promise. It took me taking a step back from the daily grind and really analyzing what functions I was performing. Surprisingly, it was very clear that many of the activities keeping me at work until 2 am were duplicated from months earlier. So what was the solution to fixing my inefficiencies? Leveraging my provision while preparing the tax return!

Now this concept may sound overly simple – and some of you may be saying “uh…yeah, I do that already – nice value-added concept Einstein.” Aside from reminding you that my name is actually Chris, I also challenge you to really evaluate how much you truly are leveraging your provision. Many organizations are dependent on the steroid induced spreadsheets for provision purposes. Aside from a litany of formula errors and inefficiencies inherent with Excel, you also don’t have the ability to directly communicate with your compliance solution. Thus, you find yourself rekeying schedule M’s into the compliance solution’s workpapers and verifying reasonableness with your provision’s current expense calculation. Further, you find yourself analyzing the trial balance twice – once at provision time, and then again when mapping it into the compliance solution. Lastly, to ensure you didn’t miss anything on the tax return or blow the provision, you perform a comparison of the tax return book-to-tax reconciliation to your provision’s current calculation. Strangely enough, you feel a sense of déjà vu while truing up your deferreds and payable weeks later when calculating your return-to-provision adjustment. Thankfully, these three examples of redundant tasks can be fixed by implementing a single solution to drive both your compliance and provision process. CCH Global Integrator is that solution.

Global Integrator allows you to fully leverage your hard work performed on the provision when preparing the tax return. Use Global Integrator not only as a provision solution, but also to drive the compliance process and finalize taxable income. With just a couple clicks your schedule M’s will magically appear on Schedule M-3 or M-1 within your ProSystem fx®/CorpSystem™ compliance solution (yes, our software engineers like to think they’re magicians). No need to rekey schedule M’s! In addition, with those same magical clicks Global Integrator and ProSystem fx/CorpSystem seamlessly populate the 1120 with the trial balance previously analyzed in Global Integrator. No need to remap or upload financial information twice – one and done! Lastly, your déjà vu out-of-body experience can be cured without harsh medication. Simply by performing the return-to-provision analysis within Global Integrator, your deferreds and payable true-ups are captured while highlighting any variances in the tax return’s book-to-tax reconciliation. All of these efficiencies can be a reality when choosing Global Integrator as your single solution.

So in closing, as the stress mounts and the days turn into late nights, I again urge you all to work smarter – not harder. By preparing the provision, you’ve already conquered 90% of the tax return, so why not leverage that hard work and make more time for more important things…like margaritas.