It’s not just about speed, it’s about confidence.
If you’ve ever felt like your indirect tax team spends more time tracking down discrepancies than driving business value, you’re not alone.
In multinational companies, highly trained tax professionals are stuck in a familiar cycle: downloading data from government portals, comparing ERP systems with compliance tools, and manually investigating non-compliances, often in conjunction with tight filing deadlines.
The pressure is increasing. Tax authorities in Romania, Hungary, Chile and Mexico now require rapid reconciliation of pre-filled tax returns, giving companies just days instead of weeks to explain discrepancies or face penalties and mandatory payments.
This shift to real-time reporting means your team can no longer afford to discover errors during month-end close. Then it’s too late.
The risk of fines, reputational damage and strained relationships with tax authorities increases every time a discrepancy goes unnoticed.
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The manual coordination effort
Why automated voting is the great liberator
The strategic value of automated voting
Time to act: Reclaim time with automated voting
The manual coordination effort
Let’s talk about what “manual tuning” really means in practice. Your team juggles data from multiple ERPs, billing systems, e‑invoicing platforms, and compliance tools, each with its own format and specifics. Tax point differences, foreign exchange conversions, credit notes and billing deadline issues create a tangled web of potential discrepancies.
Without centralized automation, every voting cycle becomes a detective mission. Team members sometimes spend hours extracting files, creating complex spreadsheets, and cross-referencing line items.
The process is not only time-consuming, but also error-prone and creates an unnecessary feedback loop: more manual work can lead to more errors, which requires even more manual investigation.
A Forrester Total Economic Impact study found that companies using legacy approaches had error rates of 3% before reconciliation efforts, meaning three full-time employees had to spend 20% of their time just investigating and correcting invoice errors. That’s talent and budgets that could be deployed elsewhere if only your systems could keep up.
Why automated voting is the great liberator
This is where the transformation begins. Modern voting solutions can automatically collect data from e‑invoicing platforms. ERP systemsand compliance tools then perform row-level matching using the latest tax rules and rates.
Instead of manually searching for discrepancies, intelligent automation flags discrepancies, then categorizes them by type (tax point differences, FX mismatches, missing transactions) and maps them to the affected VAT or GST return fields.
The impact is immediate and measurable. With drag-and-drop reports, customizable dashboards, and pre-built filters, your team can divide and prioritize data in minutes instead of days.
Companies implementing automated reconciliations have achieved a 50% reduction in workload for compliance and tax teams, with error rates dropping from 3% to under 0.5%.
When inspection notices arrive or pre-filled returns need to be validated, you no longer have to struggle. You are ready.
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The strategic value of automated voting
In a recent survey, 60% of tax professionals said they spend 1 to 5 hours per country per month on reconciliation. And 4 in 7 said they would save 20–60% of their time with an automation tool.
With the right automation tool, your team will stop drowning in voting tables and start thinking strategically. Instead of reactive “firefighting,” tax professionals can finally focus on tax planning, business model optimization, and advising executives on cross-border expansion.
A majority (59%) of organizations are now prioritizing Qualification of your tax teams for strategic workand automation makes that possible. Your team’s deep indirect tax expertise becomes a competitive advantage, not a compliance burden.
You can answer future-oriented questions:
What are the tax implications of entering Southeast Asia?
How will the proposed VAT changes impact our supply chain?
What hidden risks exist in our M&A due diligence?
This strategic increase not only benefits the tax function; It changes the way the entire organization views taxes.
Time to act: Reclaim time with automated voting
Executing real-time audit orders will not slow down and the complexity of reconciliations will only increase. That’s why Thomson Reuters is investing in the development of automated voting. Electronic invoicing for VAT return reconciliation has been newly added to the ONESOURCE solution package. And a second phase of SAF‑T rollout for e‑invoices and VAT returns will follow soon. A third phase with GL voting and other ONESOURCE solutions is also coming.
Check out our free demo of ONESOURCE Reconciliations to learn more.
