An area of great worry for financial service companies and FinTech companies alike is the area of tax reporting. As soon as you mention the word “tax” and “reporting” in the same sentence you stir up a lot of feelings with anger, frustration and pure fear.
As a product manager for Bricknode I have been struggling with this area for quite some time but finally I think that we have cracked the main problem and reduced the problem down to its essence. Tax reporting is nothing more than an export of data that is massaged into another format and then imported to a tax agency. Yes, there are a few things to think about regarding generating reports for the customer of what has been submitted to the tax agency but this is nothing real heavy.
The main issue is if you have disorganized data that is not connected in places where you need to have connections in order to export the correct data relationships.
All relationships should be managed by a back office system but then the actual massaging and verification of data can be made in one of the most dynamic tools around…Excel!
Year after year we have been overwhelmed by generating tax files for our customers, then corrections and changes are made in the back office system by our customers and export files has to be produced all over again. Some issues might be small enough that they could stay un-corrected in the back office system but they need to be changed for the tax reporting.
It was actually our CIO, Daniel, who came up with the idea of having an app that extracted data from back office, organized it into an understandable Excel sheet for the user, let the user change whatever they want and then let them import the Excel sheet to the app that in turn produces the tax file for the tax agency and the report documents for our customers.
No more need for customers to be forced to buy consultancy time and a full integration with a tool that back office workers swear by, Excel!