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A Modern Approach to Tax Transformation in the Oracle Cloud

By Marc Duclos posted 01-17-2023 09:02 AM

  

According to a recent study by Gartner, Inc., 83% of organizations say they’re facing different digital transformation challenges than they were two years ago, yet less than one-third of surveyed chief financial officers are confident their current technologies are aligned to ensure the future success of their organizations. 

As a result,
the journey to the cloud for most organizations has become increasingly complex—and increasingly important for the tax department. As organizations have had to evolve their business models, with smaller teams and fewer resources, the need for efficiency has never been greater. And that is especially true for tax and finance teams.

In fact, the tax department can enhance the value of their organization’s overall digital transformation effort by either adding a tax automation and compliance solution or migrating their existing solutions to the cloud in tandem with larger enterprise resource planning (ERP) cloud migrations.
 The key is aligning the needs of the business, with the requirements that tax and compliance regulations mandate, and charting the best path forward to get economies of scale and maximize value for the organization.

For Oracle customers, that also means aligning tax, finance and IT regarding their cloud and application strategy:
 

  • Migrating your Oracle ERP and Vertex solutions to Oracle Cloud, provides access to the latest features and capabilities tax and finance teams need to support modern business models and tax compliance requirements

 

  • By positioning themselves to be included in the larger finance transformation efforts, tax leaders can leverage the larger budgets and ample resources attached to Oracle Cloud ERP/Cloud implementations

 

  • Automating tax determination, as well as the maintenance and updating of tax data, can not only bring process efficiency and improved accuracy for tax calculations, but can free tax, finance, and IT resources for other strategic tasks.

The organizational benefits include: 

  • Better access to tax data: Cloud solutions eliminate the concerns tax groups have regarding where tax data is located since the data is stored centrally within the application. If an audit occurs, that data can be easily and quickly accessed. 

 

  • The ability to use advanced tools: Current cloud-based ecosystems feature a variety of advanced tools and methodologies that provide powerful data analytics that tax groups can utilize—and through the use of related microservices, build additional tools through low-code development mechanisms. 

 

  • Low-impact system updates: Through the cloud model, all updates to the tax technology are integrated into the system by the cloud provider—an essential benefit given the significant number of tax rates and rules change each year.

  • Cost savings: Cloud-based systems and applications generally cost less to maintain and update from a total cost perspective. 

 

  • Deeper connections and collaborations with technology providers: When migrating to the cloud, the tax technology provider becomes a strategic partner to the tax department, helping ensure the tax solution configuration supports the tax group’s needs.

 

  • Less budgeting complexity: Purchasing and maintaining an on-premises system requires budgeting for hardware (which also requires depreciation or amortization), maintenance, and internal IT costs. In a cloud environment, budgeting for hardware, maintenance and internal IT costs are replaced with a single budget item for the cloud service. 

About the Author
Marc Duclos is Sr. Director, Global Strategic Partnerships at Vertex. As the leader in tax technology for more than 40 years, Vertex has been connecting great people and partners to deliver trusted tax solutions, while helping customers around the globe transform and modernize their tax and technology platforms. That is why Oracle trusts Vertex solutions to support their own business.