Accountants’ Guide to a Successful Tax Season

Tax season, or simply the “busy season” to accounting professionals, is a time filled with critical decisions, tight deadlines, and complex regulations. It is the season accountants must gear up for every year as they stay laser-focused on delivering for their clients from January through April.

In addition to the surge of tax filings and need to stay on top of the latest rules, accountants must juggle other challenges such as hiring new talent amidst a talent shortage, adapting to new tax and regulatory changes, and maintaining a healthy business, just to name a few.

Being an accountant is hard and rewarding work, and the right tools can make it more manageable. Here are six tips to help you thrive during this tax season and excel far into the future.

1. Embrace artificial intelligence. ??

While AI can’t match the skills of an accounting expert, it can be a useful tool. For example, AI might be helpful for recalling facts (such as a specific detail in the tax code), understanding instructional material (such as GAAP guidance), and even applying guidelines to a certain situation (such as lease rules). On the flip side, a recent AICPA panel that tested AI in various areas of accounting found it consistently ineffective in analyzing relationships, making judgments, and providing creativity, all areas where accountants can provide particular value. Accountants might welcome the opportunity to spend more time focused on higher-level tasks such as judgments and creative thinking and less time memorizing rules and regulations that AI can help you with.?

2. Implement continuous accounting. ??

Continuous accounting is a technology-driven approach that seeks to balance accounting workloads and provide more timely information, replacing month-end or quarter-end deadlines with frequent completion of close-related tasks. Moving from an event driven close process to continuous accounting has many benefits, including less burdensome tax filings. All businesses file tax returns annually. To do this, they need to assemble all their data and justify every penny that has moved through their systems throughout the year. Continuous accounting increases the efficiency and accuracy of that process, reducing preparation costs while providing yearlong access to accurate and timely data for tax-planning purposes.

3. Stay up to date with changing tax laws. ??

Effectively navigating tax law changes is a constant necessity for accounting teams. The Inflation Reduction Act brought key tax changes, including a new alternative minimum tax for corporations and renewable energy credits. Automation can help ensure compliance with accounting standards, government regulations, tax laws, and internal policies by consistently applying the appropriate rules and schedules to revenue recognition, depreciation, prepaid and deferred expenses, and other financial processes. By implementing quality accounting software that provides digital, accurate, and easy-to-access records and deep tax functionality, you can make a complex tax year more manageable.?

4. Improve payroll management. ??

Remote work has made state income taxes more daunting because of the complexity of determining primary work location and then managing withholdings for employees in different locations for every pay period. Plus, violations can trigger audits and result in costly tax penalties.

If you haven’t already, consider automating your payroll processes. Cloud-based payroll platforms help with the calculation of earnings, deductions, company contributions, taxes and paid time off. These systems provide support for multiple jurisdictions when it comes to taxes, forms, direct deposit, and more and receive regular updates to ease compliance challenges.

5. Prioritize upskilling. ??

Boosting skills and expertise around how to use key systems and what to do with their outputs will help your company make the most of its technology investments and benefit employees and the business as a whole, especially as automation increases. Focus on building skills related to cloud-based payroll, enterprise resource planning systems, data analytics, financial modeling, and forecasting.?

6. Automate, automate, automate. ??

When this tax season is over, there will always be another close around the corner or new tax laws on the horizon. The right cloud accounting system helps you stay efficient and agile, reducing manual processes by automating data entry, calculations, reporting, and form generation while also keeping you up to date with the latest tax regulations and changes. By embracing automation, accountants can free up time, increase productivity, reduce manual errors, and drive more business growth.?

Here are a couple of our solutions that can help make your tax season easier:

• NetSuite SuiteTax is a configurable tax engine that delivers complete global tax management. Finance and accounting teams can easily generate detailed reports and analyze transactions down to line-item details in real time. Plus, its built-in tax logic automatically determines taxability and calculations on every transaction, down to the individual item level. SuiteTax simplifies global tax compliance, saves time, reduces costs, and eliminates manual calculations. Learn more about NetSuite SuiteTax in the Tip of the Week below.?
• NetSuite Corporate Tax Reporting extends our tax management capabilities beyond what SuiteTax offers to enhance your level of control. While SuiteTax automates tax provisioning calculations (such as VAT/GST) and eases tax compliance, NetSuite Tax Reporting includes two more capabilities. First, workflow and task management organizes all your tax-related tasks in one clean dashboard, helping your global teams track their work related to tax returns, audit management, country-by-country reporting, and more. Second, transfer pricing helps you calculate and manage prices for transactions between subsidiaries or business units in different countries.

Laughter is an appreciating asset ???

We get it…tax season is no laughing matter.? Between the long nights spent closing the books and the pressure to be perfect for your clients, accountants really need a sense of humor to cope with it all. This list of accounting jokes are sure to make you smile—and maybe even give your team a little boost.

Business Guide: CFO’s Guide to Better, Faster Accounting and Decision-Making

You don’t have to dread the end of the month. With a continuous close, you can deliver better results, have happier employees, and drive deeper, more timely financial insights. Our guide breaks down how continuous accounting can help redirect energy to what really matters in the business.?

Article: IRS Audits: Reasons, What to Expect, and How to Handle

Preparation is key in understanding how the auditing process works, the different types of audits, common triggers, and what to do if that dreaded letter arrives in the mail.

SuiteTax: Simplify Tax Returns

Cut down on time and costs with NetSuite’s integrated tax engine SuiteTax, which allows you to run and submit your tax returns directly from NetSuite.

Tax Reporting

Generating regional tax reports automatically prepares completed tax return forms with drill-down capabilities to view detailed transactions.

Standard tax return templates are editable to guarantee compliance with regional requirements.

Prepare and submit your tax return in 7 easy steps:

1. Navigate to Reports > Tax > Country Tax Reports
2. Select the Subsidiary and confirm the tax Nexus
3. Select the report template from the Report Name drop-down list
4. Select the Start Date and End Date for the period to report on
5. Click [Generate]
6. Once the report has been processed, click the View link to access the report. Drill into the detailed report by clicking on the hyperlinked currency value for that line on the tax return form.
7. Click [Submit to Tax Agency] to submit tax information and legal declaration to the selected Nexus’ tax agency.

To learn more about setup and processing of Taxes in NetSuite visit MyLearn (Learning Cloud Support (LCS) Company Pass required). For more information on the LCS Company Pass, including exploring free LCS content, visit here.

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