From a Culture of Worksheets to a Culture of Analytics

[AlteryxAdvocacy]

Author:

Zara Muradali, Anthony Stola, Alex Schmitt

Role:

Partner & Northeast Innovation Leader, Manager, Senior Associate

Company:

Grant Thornton

Overview of Use Case

Grant Thornton is one of the world’s leading organizations of independent audit, tax and advisory firms. They heavily invest in understanding their clients' environments and processes, allowing them to provide the best advice and solutions possible. Today’s client environments require analytics, data manipulation, and most importantly, fast innovation. Learn in this use case how Alteryx enabled Grant Thornton to rethink and recreate their methods of services. They are leveraging Alteryx in daily tasks, from small engagements to extensive tax consulting, improving collaboration, agility, and responsibility with clients, while also providing the stepping stones for the future of automation and AI.

Describe the business challenge or problem you needed to solve

Self-service and user friendly

• We needed a tool that was accessible for everyone in the firm – from entry level associate to senior managers.

“I’m not in IT, I’m an accountant” is no longer an excuse

• Today client services demand staff to be fast and accurate. Not being able to work with large sets of data is not an excuse for preventing accuracy and efficiency in the 21^st .We need a tool that sits in our offices and can perform on these large data sets and high demands.
• Lower possibility for human error. There are many options for efficiency; we needed to take into consideration that in certain circumstances client data must be manipulated and Alteryx provided the platform that allows us to manipulate and transform data without risking its quality.

 Speed and efficiency

Describe your working solution

Alteryx and Wayfair

South Dakota v. Wayfair, Inc. Supreme Court case decided on June 21, 2018, to change the way sales and use tax are imposed on out-of-state business. Previously, filing requirements were created by a “physical presence”. So, South Dakota challenged that standard and created thresholds where if you had over generally $100,000 to $250,000 or 100-200 transactions, you may have to start collecting and filing in South Dakota. And as a result, more than 40 states now have sales tax “economic nexus” rules proposed or enacted. It’s a massive compliance burden for businesses, especially small online sellers, because since it’s state law states get to decide just about whatever they want about how they want to do it.

Our Alteryx solution includes:

• We’ve developed tools that use either a standard input template, or proprietary internal workpapers to automatically perform preliminary Wayfair analysis
• Standard process creates capacity for research and higher value-add tasks

Visualizations show current filing locations, states nearing thresholds, states exceeding thresholds, other proprietary analytics.

Alteryx & GT Fixed Asset Services

We have numerous data sources in a variety of states (SAP, Oracle, ERP/CRM, Excel, Misc. Reports, F/A Subledgers, Treasury, etc.). Tax stands in a unique position between all this data and creates a wealth of opportunities from an optimization and analytics perspective. However, lot of overhead in data validation, transformation and analysis. Alteryx helps to automate the data entry function of the provision & compliance process though manipulation, transformation of source documents and creation of Excel or CSV import files. How we used Alteryx to automate our process:

• Aggregate and Append all PBC data into one file
• Cleanse all data at once
• Join current & prior periods data together
• Perform calculations to help identify changes between periods
• Transform to:
  • Fixed asset software import
  • Visualization software source file

Power of software with apportionment

Our client provides us with a standard PBC file, and we have about 75 packages. Historically we would look at each of those 75 packages and analyze them individually and they would go into their own respective entity folders. They would be across 75 folders all over the place. So, when we got to the state time we had to go and find all those folders. So, I'm using Alteryx to build us a little bit of a database for all their state apportionment that they give us and aggregate that and structure it in a way that we can use it.

Alteryx	Corptax	Power BI
·         Combine & Cleanse Client Data ·         Calculate & Adjust Factors ·         Structure Data for Import into Corptax	·         Calculate Tax, Payments, Apportionment, etc. ·         Query Amounts from Database	·         Current & Prior Year Comparison ·         Potential New Filings (Nexus) ·         Manage by Exception

We get client information, but we don't have knowledge of what happened at the business. We run a comparison from previous year to current year and have different visuals that help us provide insights. The idea here is that we can tell customers in advance if there is something wrong. They have these insights to plan by the end of the year if they need to move inventory or something.

 Describe the benefits you have achieved

With Alteryx, I let the workflow do all the work for me and I spend most of my time analyzing the data and finding insights that might help our clients. Also, it's more rewarding because I went to school to do accounting and taxes. I didn't go to school to cut and paste.

When you're sharing your use cases amongst your coworkers and folks who are using Alteryx, you'll realize that once you build a real workflow, you can use it for multiple reasons and multiple clients or multiple processes. That's where the culture of sharing and setting up a user community becomes important. So, we started at Grant Thornton our own Alteryx user community. Other key benefits are:

Ownership of YOUR work

• No longer does staff feel that they are performing someone else’s thought-process; being the self-service tool that it is, Alteryx allows staff to design and take full ownership of the results they achieve.

Alteryx support and Community

• Alteryx staff on the GT account – a phone call away
• The Alteryx Community promotes sharing across Alteryx users. The Alteryx Community also offers online trainings and exclusive resources in assisting staff become proficient in Alteryx.

Related Resources

The entire PowerPoint presentation can be found here. Additionally, visit this link to watch the entire recorded session.