A tax team we worked with was spending four weeks preparing its reporting every period. Not four weeks of analysis or judgement - four weeks of extracting data, reshaping it, and reconciling it by hand. By the time the numbers were ready, there was little time left for the work that actually adds value.
By the end of the project, the same cycle ran in minutes.
This is how we got there - and why the approach is repeatable for almost any tax or finance team carrying a heavy, manual reporting process.
The four-week problem
The team’s reporting depended on pulling data from multiple sources, transforming it into the shapes each downstream process needed, and reconciling everything back together. Each step was manual, each was a chance to introduce an error, and the whole thing had to be repeated every period.
The cost was not just time. It was key-person risk, audit friction, and a team too busy assembling numbers to interrogate them.
What we built
We did two things:
- Enhanced the existing ONESOURCE Corporate Tax implementation so the platform did more of the heavy lifting, with consistent, templated computations.
- Added two Alteryx workflows with API integrations - one automating data extraction for group reporting, the other automating statutory reporting tax disclosure preparation.
Crucially, we did not rip anything out. Alteryx sat alongside the existing tax software, maintaining the digital links between systems and doing the repetitive transformation work that used to be done by hand.
The result: weeks to minutes
Once the workflows were built, the cycle that used to take four weeks ran in minutes - the same data, the same outputs, produced automatically and consistently.
The knock-on effects mattered more than the headline time saving:
- Accuracy improved - fewer manual touch-points, fewer errors.
- The audit was simpler - a documented, repeatable process is far easier to explain.
- Capacity was freed - the team could finally spend time on tax position analysis and value-adding work.
“The project exceeded our expectations. Our workflows run flawlessly and we’re already feeling the benefits.” — Head of Tax, Multinational Group
Why it works (and why it’s repeatable)
The reason this approach travels well is that it is low-code, documented, and owned by the tax team - not a black-box bespoke build. The Alteryx workflows are visual and auditable, so the team can run them, understand them, and adapt them as the business changes.
That is the difference between automation that creates a new dependency and automation that genuinely gives time back.
Could your team do the same?
If a reporting or compliance process in your team is measured in weeks and built on manual data wrangling, there is a strong chance it can be automated - and you do not need to replace your existing tax software to do it.
