The time-saving power of automated reconciliations for modern tax teams
It isn’t just about speed, it’s about confidence.
If you’ve ever felt like your indirect tax team spends more time hunting down discrepancies than driving business value, you’re not alone.
Across multinational companies, highly skilled tax professionals are stuck in a familiar cycle: downloading data from government portals, reconciling ERP systems with compliance tools, and manually investigating mismatches, often right up against tight filing deadlines.
The pressure is intensifying. Tax authorities in Romania, Hungary, Chile, and Mexico now require rapid reconciliation of prefilled returns, giving companies just days, not weeks, to explain variances or face penalties and forced payments.
This shift toward real-time reporting means your team can no longer afford to discover errors during month-end close. By then, it’s too late.
The risk of fines, reputational damage, and strained relationships with tax authorities escalates every time a discrepancy goes unnoticed.
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The manual reconciliations burden
Why automated reconciliations is the great liberator
The strategic value of automated reconciliations
Time to act: Reclaim your time with automated reconciliations
The manual reconciliations burden
Let’s talk about what “manual reconciliations” really means in practice. Your team is juggling data from multiple ERPs, billing systems, e-invoicing platforms, and compliance tools, each with its own format and quirks. Tax point differences, foreign exchange conversions, credit notes, and invoice timing issues create a tangled web of potential mismatches.
Without centralized automation, every reconciliations cycle becomes a detective mission. Team members sometimes spend hours extracting files, building complex spreadsheets, and cross-referencing line items.
The process is not only time-consuming but error-prone, creating an unnecessary feedback loop: more manual work can lead to more mistakes, which requires even more manual investigation.
A Forrester Total Economic Impact study found that organizations using legacy approaches had error rates of 3% before reconciliations efforts, requiring three full-time employees spending 20% of their time just investigating and correcting invoice errors. That’s talent and budget that could be deployed elsewhere, if only your systems could keep pace.
Why automated reconciliations is the great liberator
Here’s where the transformation begins. Modern reconciliations solutions can automatically ingest data from e-invoicing platforms, ERP systems, and compliance tools, then perform line-level matching using the latest tax rules and rates.
Instead of your team manually hunting for discrepancies, intelligent automation flags variances, then categorizes them by type (tax point differences, FX mismatches, missing transactions), and maps them to the affected VAT or GST return boxes.
The impact is immediate and measurable. With drag-and-drop reporting, customizable dashboards, and pre-built filters, your team can slice and prioritize data in minutes rather than days.
Organizations implementing automated reconciliations have achieved a 50% workload reduction for compliance and tax teams, with error rates dropping from 3% to below .5%.
When audit notices arrive or prefilled returns need validation, you’re no longer scrambling. You’re ready.
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The strategic value of automated reconciliations
In a recent poll, 60% of tax professionals said they spend 1-5 hours on reconciliation per country, per month. And 4 out of 7 said they would save 20-60% of their time with an automation tool.
With the right automation tool, your team stops drowning in reconciliations spreadsheets and starts thinking strategically. Instead of reactive “firefighting,” tax professionals can finally focus on tax planning, business model optimization, and advising leadership on cross-border expansion.
A majority (59%) of organizations now prioritize upskilling their tax teams for strategic work, and automation makes that possible. Your team’s deep expertise in indirect tax becomes a competitive advantage, not a compliance liability.
They can answer forward-looking questions:
What are the tax implications of entering Southeast Asia?
How will proposed VAT changes impact our supply chain?
What hidden risks exist in our M&A due diligence?
This strategic elevation doesn’t just benefit the tax function; it transforms how the entire organization views tax.
Time to act: Reclaim your time with automated reconciliations
Real-time audit mandates aren’t slowing down and reconciliations complexity will only increase. That’s why Thomson Reuters is investing and developing automated reconciliations. E-invoicing to VAT return reconciliations has been newly added to the ONESOURCE solution stack. And a second phase roll out with SAF-T to e-invoices and VAT returns will be coming soon. A third phase is also on the horizon with GL reconciliations and other ONESOURCE solutions.
Watch our free demo of ONESOURCE Reconciliations to learn more.