Whatever our conception of a tax professional might have been, the tax professional of the future will be very different. And the change is already underway.
Tax departments are one of the heaviest consumers of financial data that they have no input in producing or structuring. They’re at the whims of others and have to adapt continuously. In the past, that has meant an endless stream of manual processes to make inconsistently structured data useful for tax.
But tax departments are realizing these manual processes are a drain on productivity, add risk, reduce job satisfaction and lengthen financial close cycles unnecessarily. With this realization, more progressive tax departments have embraced digital upskilling and retooling.Â
While knowledge of tax rules and regulations will remain a prerequisite for tax departments, we’re increasingly seeing tax professionals needing to be—and becoming—more comfortable with:Â
data structuring
report writing from enterprise resource planning (ERP) and business intelligence (BI) tools
data modelling
data transformation using Excel, Alteryx or other similar tools
data visualizations
small automation to reduce manual tasks
This doesn't mean tax professionals have to become technology experts—at least no more than tax professionals 30 years ago needed to become experts in Excel (or was it Lotus 1-2-3). But it does mean tax professionals of the future need to have data and technology literacy beyond what we traditionally thought was necessary.