Financial Services Ireland

CASE STUDY

Case study: automation of fixed assets register (FAR) process

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The client’s request

We were asked to automate the corporation tax process for the fixed assets register (FAR). This involved high volumes of assets that could not be handled by the tax module in their ERP to identify the correct addition, disposals and retirement of assets. The automation process developed new features to handle assets purchased in multi-currencies from numerous jurisdictions and manual adjustments. The aim of automation was to remove manual adjustments to identify the correct additions and correct disposals to calculate the capital allowances correctly.

There were some added complexities that required manual adjustments including the sale of assets to customers, the movement of assets between jurisdictions, capturing corrections to assets value incorrectly entered to the ERP, identifying end of life assets from a tax perspective, tracking the correct date of additions for Irish tax rules and removing the error of double counting assets as a result of the movement of assets between jurisdictions.

Original process

  • The multinational financial institution has a high volume of assets.
  • 800,000 assets, 50,000 additions and 7,000 disposals in multiple currencies.
  • Source files manipulated by finance prior to tax review.
  • 25% of corporate tax team resources spent manually re-engineering the tax fixed assets register.
  • Two weeks to finalise the tax FAR.
  • No capital allowance calculation possible reliant on tax advisor to prepare figures.
  • Manual reconciliations of assets transferring between branches.
  • Estimates used for tax provisioning.

New process and the benefits realised

  • Implemented robotic tools that automated data extraction to produce the tax provisioning. amounts for local and consolidation financial accounting purposes.
  • Reduced manual and time-consuming work from weeks to minutes for both the client and EY.
  • Two workflows taking 40 seconds and not weeks. 90% of time saved annually.
  • Reduction in future staff hours for preparation and training.
  • Multi-currency capabilities developed to convert to Euro for Irish tax purposes.
  • Identify exceptions for review.
  • Use for audit and provisioning purposes, as well as reconciliation of the financial statements.

Sinéad Colreavy

FS Partner, Tax and EY FS Ireland People Partner
Sinéad's Full Profile