When was the last time you or anyone on your property tax team went home at 5 p.m. on a workday during tax season?

Sounds impossible, right? Well, that was the case with one of our clients, whose office I stopped into recently at the end of a workday. The place was deserted. When I asked where everyone was, the response was, “They went home. They’re done!”

When even toothbrush manufacturers now claim to use artificial intelligence (AI) in their products, it’s a sign—not that AI has come so far as to be ubiquitous, but that there’s definite confusion about the meaning of the term.

Automation is becoming a standard part of business operations—even for small and mid-sized organizations. Gone are the days of doing everything manually. Staying competitive requires more agility, and the ability to focus more on strategic concerns and less on repetitive tasks.

If you’re reading this, chances are your tax team is so caught up in mundane tasks they can’t address higher-value work such as research, planning, and analysis. So strategic tax questions for your organization go unanswered.

What if you could manage your company’s property taxes from anywhere, in less time, with fewer errors, and with greater confidence in your work product?

If you’re like most companies, you’d jump at the chance. As the amount of data expands and the number of team members shrinks, lots of tax teams are in search of a property tax management system that can help them do more with less. They’re switching from the limited-functionality legacy solutions they’ve been using for years to newer, more modern solutions that encourage growth and support greater productivity.

Imagine if your team no longer had to spend hundreds of hours each tax season on data entry. What could they be doing with all that time?

There’s a sea change happening in the tax industry: Where the focus was once on compliance, it’s now about value—ensuring fair taxes are being paid, managing tax risk, evaluating the tax consequences of business activities, and more. Underlying this shift to a more strategic tax practice—and enabling it to happen—is a new reliance on tax technology. In this article, we’ll look more closely at what tax technology is, and how it’s changing tax practices for the better.

As one of the largest expenses for corporations, tax is an area worth scrutinizing. Changes in tax law as well as the way the profession is practiced can have a material impact on the success of an organization. And while tax law is not within our purview (unfortunately!), we do have some idea about common problems faced by tax professionals—after all, our team’s tax backgrounds have a big impact on the design of our property tax software.

Every corporate leader who invests in advanced technology is motivated in large part by the expected ROI it will produce. (There’s also a healthy fear surrounding what could happen as a result of doing nothing.) The same is true for the tax industry. Property tax professionals who have already started using the latest technology tools—including tax document automation software like CrowdReason—are seeing greater levels of productivity and higher-quality work product that makes their team more valuable for their organizations and clients. Why?

By now you’ve heard all about it: Technology is changing the way people work. That’s true across all industries and workplaces, whether it’s the floor of a manufacturing facility or the office space of an insurance company.