Tax Control & Reporting Automation with RPA

The Background

Our client is a mid-sized European IT service company that has offices around the world. As the company was growing more than 30% per year, their finance department had to scale their capacity as well. First, they needed to automate manual routine work related to reporting and controlling tax-related services. The amount of such tasks was scaling in numbers every day and was taking more and more time. Also when a financial manager accomplishes the same task according to the same algorithm hundreds of times per month, it’s hard to stay attentive and some critical mistakes appear.

Our client was in dire need of an RPA solution to significantly reduce the time spent on tax-related tasks to double-check everything and minimize the risk of human error in such areas as:

• Monitoring of timing and accuracy of tax payments.

• Flawless preparation of internal and external tax reports for local government agencies.

• Checking tax payments following the local standards to avoid fines.

The Challenge

Since pwrteams has its own RPA Center of Excellence, our specialists can analyze automation needs, create a proof of concept, and advise on the scope of RPA. So, the client’s finance department wanted to consult with our RPA experts to evaluate how they can automate processes to take a load off their employees and save effort for more sophisticated tasks.

The finance department needed an RPA bot to accomplish the following actions accordingly to the defined algorithms:

• An automated login for the tax payment system.

• Verification of all performed actions in tax payment systems.

• Verification, processing, and collection of all the necessary data from various tax systems in a file for subsequent assessment by employees of the financial group.

The main challenge in the development of the required solution was that pwrteams RPA Lab had to build an RPA bot on the test environment with no access to the client’s critical financial or personal data. So later a financial manager could replicate it and launch it in the real-life conditions without external help.

Strategic Partnership

At first, pwrteams RPA team held a discovery session with the Head of the client’s finance department and managing director to discuss future cooperation. The client also allocated a financial manager to consult pwrteams RPA team during the project.

As soon as the initial analysis was ready, pwrteams team started implementing the RPA solution using UiPath Studio for robot development according to the defined business processes and logic, and supported the client’s finance team during robot deployment, and first launches.

The Results

There was one dedicated pwrteams UiPath expert who managed the project from the very beginning, she also gathered requirements for RPA creation, did the testing and implementation, and consulted and educated the users. Overall, it took less than 3 months to reach the project goals.

In result, pwrteams has built a robot that collects and processes all tax-related data into one file. The user can launch it using the UiPath Assistant in Picture-in-Picture mode. Such a function allows you to start serviced processes in cooperation with the robot. A picture-in-picture process runs in a separate and isolated Windows session, which enables the machine to be used while the process is running.

With our solution, the client has achieved the following results:

• 5x time cut on accomplishment of all tax-related actions. The time needed for checking and collecting of all information about tax payment reduced from two working days to three working hours.

• 100% eliminated human errors in long-term and routine work.

• Finance team got free time to perform more complex work that requires more attention and thinking.

Complete automation of three main processes:

• Control of various tax payments.

• Submission of a quarterly tax reports.

• Checking the timeliness of tax payment to avoid fines.