Every compliance season, the same pressure returns. Data is late. Systems do not talk to each other. The team is stretched. Deadlines feel impossible. The scramble to pull everything together consumes the time that should be spent reviewing it.
That pressure is uncomfortable. It is also useful - because it tells you exactly where your process is breaking down.
Find the bottlenecks
The first step is the most important: identify specifically where time is being lost. Not “data preparation is slow” in general terms, but which exact step, which system, which data flow.
Common bottlenecks in a typical corporate tax or statutory reporting cycle:
- Manual extraction and reformatting of trial balance data
- Rekeying figures between systems (ERP to tax platform, tax computation to statutory accounts)
- Chasing data from finance teams who are running their own parallel processes
- Running exception checks manually in spreadsheets
- Reconciling between two versions of what should be the same number
Each of these is a specific, fixable problem. The goal of the bottleneck exercise is to create a prioritised list - most time-consuming first - rather than trying to improve everything at once.
Extract without distraction
Once you know where the time goes, the question is how to recover it.
Tools like Alteryx and API connections between systems remove the extraction and reformatting burden almost entirely. Rather than exporting a trial balance, opening it in Excel, applying a mapping table, checking for errors, and manually loading the result, a workflow handles every step automatically. The data arrives clean, in the right format, ready for the platform.
For an introduction to how APIs make this possible in a tax context, see Understanding APIs: Unlocking the Power Behind Modern Tax Technology.
The point is not to automate for its own sake. The point is to give your team their time back - so they can spend compliance season doing analysis and review, rather than data processing.
Standardise
Automation only works if the inputs are consistent. Before building workflows, it is worth establishing standard data formats, standard mapping tables, and a consistent approach to adjustments across entities.
This is unglamorous work. It rarely feels urgent. But standardisation is the foundation that makes automation reliable rather than brittle. A workflow that handles one entity’s TB reliably but fails on another because the account codes are structured differently is worse than no workflow at all - it gives false confidence.
Invest in standardisation first. Automation compounds on top of it.
Automate to elevate
Once the basics are standardised, automation can start eliminating the work that currently consumes your team.
The best targets for early automation are processes that are:
- Repetitive across multiple entities or periods
- High-volume but low-judgement (data extraction, format conversion, loading)
- Currently dependent on a single person who knows how the spreadsheet works
As these processes become automated and reliable, the team’s capacity shifts. Instead of spending compliance season moving data, they spend it reviewing outputs, investigating anomalies, and making judgements. That is a materially better use of qualified tax and finance professionals.
Integrate to innovate
The next step is connecting systems that currently operate in silos.
For groups using ONESOURCE Corporate Tax and ONESOURCE Statutory Reporting, for example, there is typically a manual step in the middle where tax disclosure figures are extracted from one system and entered into the other. That step can be eliminated through an API connection - one change in the tax computation flows through automatically to the statutory accounts.
This kind of integration is also increasingly relevant in the context of Companies House digital filing requirements, which will require iXBRL-tagged accounts to be filed using commercial software for accounts filed on or after 1 April 2028. Groups that have connected their systems early will be significantly better placed to meet that deadline without a last-minute scramble.
Embrace the opportunity
Compliance season pressure is not going to disappear. Filing deadlines will continue to arrive on schedule. But the teams that use each difficult season as a diagnostic - identifying the specific process failures, fixing them methodically, and building on each improvement - will progressively reduce the burden on the people doing the work.
The transformation does not happen all at once. It happens one fixed bottleneck at a time.
If you would like to talk through where your process is breaking down and what options exist to address it, get in touch.
