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Tax, Audit + Office of Finance

State Apportionment Help

kllagud
5 - Atom

Hello! I am a new Alteryx user this year in my company's tax department. My coworkers and I would really like to create workflows to help with our state income tax apportionment process but the process is so daunting that we are not really sure where to even begin. We're a large consolidated retailer and file in almost every state. Our current excel spreadsheets are probably at least 15 years old (they predate my time here) and very cumbersome.  Does anyone have suggestions for how they started or how they organized their workflows?

 

Thank you!

Kayla

17 REPLIES 17
wale_ilori
9 - Comet
Hi Kayla,

You’ve mentioned a very common dilemma and for the sake of time can’t go into too much detail right now but will drop a few thoughts.

You’ll first want to document each step of your current process.
After that, you can then begin to segment or group parts of the process to then decide how to tackle each piece. What this will enable you do is highlight all the gotchas as well as the portions of the process that are faithful standard so as to determine what portions can be automated immediately and what portions may require a decent amount of logic to make work properly.

With these two steps, you’ll also be able to assess if the current process meets the demands of what you have to do for your tax filing purposes or if other things are required, while also giving you an opportunity to completely rethink the whole process to determine if a new and better process wouldn’t be better. You don’t want to replicate a bad process if a better one is feasible.

Another approach is to take an existing process and preferably a s simple one and see if you can replicate it to prove Alteryx’s speed and value. In my case I took a process I knew like the back of my hand and replicated the steps in Alteryx to understand how it worked and It kept growing from there.

Hope these simple steps help.

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luepked
5 - Atom

Kayla,

We're in the exact same position. For better or worse, my department decided to tackle this by bringing in a 3rd party to create an Alteryx workflow that would replicate our current process. We received a "phase 1" proof-of-concept, but it ended up being very specific to the single entity that we gave them for a test case. With a few tweaks and wildcard updates, I was able to get their process to work for other entities, but all of this could only replicate and test against last year's workpapers. Now that we've got a proof-of-concept, however, it's got me rethinking our entire compliance process; trying to see how much copy/paste time I can eliminate for everyone. I hope to have a success story to share with you after this year's state filing season.

Good luck!

 

alyon
10 - Fireball

@luepked This is great! I'm one of the leaders for the Alteryx Tax, Audit and Office of Finance user group and would love to chat with you about your proof of concept, I have something in mind that you may be interested in. Would you mind sending me your preferred email address or send me a private message through the community?

Best,

Alejandra Lyon

LStevenson
7 - Meteor

I am also a new user who will be attempting to create a workflow to automate portions of our apportionment. I would like to be able to learn from what others are doing in making this possible.

joshuaburkhow
ACE Emeritus
ACE Emeritus

Hi Kayla & Others!

 

I have a team that is doing this exact work for multiple clients right now. Connect with me and we could walk through some ideas for you. You are correct it's a monster task but achievable! 

 

Joshua

jburkhow@prokarma.com

 

Joshua Burkhow - Alteryx Ace | Global Alteryx Architect @PwC | Blogger @ AlterTricks
Acsy
5 - Atom

Hi, I've just recently started using Alteryx and also am not sure how to turn what was done in Excel into an Alteryx workflow. It seems the complexity due to multiple states and US entities is hard to configure in Alteryx? Would be grateful if anyone has a ready & working  Alteryx workflow to share so I can get an idea of how to go about it.

ThomasOmer
6 - Meteoroid
If you send your email I will provide access to shared folder with examples

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Cmwick76
5 - Atom

I would love to have the state apportionment workflow for Alteryx that was mentioned.

Thanks!
CW

Teri_Staniec
6 - Meteoroid

Please send me the State Apportionment Help too!    Thanks.