In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, organisations are speeding their move to cloud-based ERP solutions—and leaders are increasingly recognising the importance of seating tax at the planning table.

As the COVID-19 crisis has made crystal clear, agility is key to survival in the face of disruption. Those organisations foresighted enough to have digitised, automated, and cloud-enabled their back-office processes have been able to pivot toward recovery. Those still pushing paper and working with on-premise systems have struggled. In a matter of weeks, the benefits of cloud-based back-office environments became painfully obvious.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the pandemic has catalysed many organisations to step up their move to cloud-based enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions. And leaders are increasingly starting to recognise that, if tax isn’t at the planning table, organisations may be missing out on significant upside opportunities. They could even be opening themselves up to new and unforeseen risks.

The reality is that, since the start of this crisis, the tax function has become a cash generator for many enterprises; indeed, in some organisations, tax has been the only source of cash while operations remained closed. The pandemic also demonstrated the benefits of integrating the tax function into organisation-wide ERP and enterprise project management systems. To chart a path forward, leaders have needed tax to develop and articulate the tax implications of a range of different scenarios—and many tax functions have floundered to get timely access to the enterprise and tax data necessary to run those sophisticated scenarios.

If tax isn’t at the table (and with its own digital road map) at this stage in the planning process, it should be. Otherwise, the entire business may find itself losing out on functionality that could be embedded to ensure the business can meet global tax planning, compliance, forecasting, and reporting requirements in the future. It will also influence the ability to assess the tax implications of strategic decisions with agility in the face of future disruption.

Why tax needs the cloud in the digital era?

Our new publication “Taking tax to the cloud” helps organisations to understand and transform their processes, technology, and resourcing models and where appropriate offer global outsourcing capabilities. This helps tax department to meet key objectives for quality and control but at a cost and in a way that also create value for their organisation.

Read more about the cloud-based ERP solutions and Download the publication here.

Deloitte’s view

Deloitte’s advice to tax leaders and business executives is to make sure the tax function is properly represented at the table throughout their organisationwide cloud transformation journey—and that they are allocated a budget for this journey that reflects the value the tax function brings to the transformation.

The most important thing is keeping tax informed, involved, and integrated into the wider organisational plan. Including tax can create game-changing
value, and organisations should not miss out.

If you would like to discuss more on this topic, please do reach out to our key contacts below.

Key contacts

Martin Krivinskas- Partner, International Tax 

Martin is an international tax partner with 20 years experience working on international tax matters. He has worked extensively with global multinationals, with a particular focus on helping international group’s mitigate tax risk and manage their effective tax rates. Martin has significant experience of supporting clients with a wide range of transfer pricing and international tax matters and is part of Deloitte` s Global Value Chain Alignment leadership team. Martin`s clients are predominantly in the life sciences, industrial products and consumer products industries.

Martin is a Chartered Accountant and a member of the Chartered Institute of Taxation

Email

Romy Mueller - Director, Indirect Tax

Romy Mueller is an Indirect Tax Director in the Business Tax practice of Deloitte Switzerland assisting clients with Swiss as well as International Indirect Tax matters, such as VAT, Customs & Excise Duties. In addition to that Romy has a focus on Tax Technology as well as Tax Management Consulting supporting clients with ERP implementations and automation of VAT compliance processes. Romy started her career in the Big4 environment 15 years ago and has extensive expertise in providing VAT advisory & compliance services to national and international clients. She is currently a member of our Swiss outbound team, serving Swiss based multinationals and European headquarters with a focus on business model transformation. Romy regularly teaches Master Classes for VAT and Direct Tax at Swiss Tax Law School (Kalaidos Fachhochschule). She is a German lawyer and holds a Post Academic Master’s degree in International VAT.

Email