Managing the business personal property tax cycle is a herculean task for companies of every size. But mid- to large-size businesses, who may have hundreds of property tax assessments to deal with annually, face exceptional challenges staying on top of information tracking, due dates, filing paperwork, and more. When their workload has outgrown the standard organizational tools—like Excel spreadsheets and online project management tools—most teams know it’s time to make the leap to property tax software.

If there was an easy way to ensure you never missed a single property tax bill payment again, would you take advantage of it?

The good news is, there is a way! We’re happy to announce that CrowdReason, developer of next-generation property tax management software, and Anybill, a leading provider of tax payment services, now work seamlessly together to guarantee your tax bills are paid accurately and on time, every time.

This year, there’s a new deadline looming for Texas business personal property tax filings: April 1. Are you well-versed on how to report your company’s assets accurately, and forecast a reliable estimate for next year’s tax liability as well? Take a look below at some tips on how property tax professionals in the Lone Star State can best manage their assets for commercial property tax in Texas, and how to prepare for the 2019 budget season.

Business property tax in California has continued to increase in recent years. In fact, in 2016, California had the largest dollar increase in the U.S. in business property tax revenue—$1.8 billion more than the year before. (It remains to be seen what impact this proposed state constitutional amendment would have on the commercial property tax rate in California should it be passed.)

If you’ve been reading our blog, you already know that the business personal property tax cycle is filled with complexities, whether you’re a business with one location or several. If you have 500 or more locations, keeping up with paperwork, information tracking, and due dates can be downright labyrinthine—never mind having enough time to put a case together for appeals (unless you’re taking advantage of all the tools at your disposal, which we’ll get into later).

For many companies, property tax due dates are always looming. Between return deadlines, appeal deadlines, and payment deadlines in multiple jurisdictions, another due date may be just around the corner, no matter what time of year it is. So how do tax teams manage and meet these dates? While there’s no single standard that works for everyone, there are tools that can help companies of all sizes do it more efficiently. 

Businesses can easily get bogged down in property tax data. County addresses, deadlines, valuation methods, depreciation tables, tax ratios… there are too many data types to list. And while there are common pieces of information people look for, the options are limited when it comes to places to look. That’s because a good chunk of this data varies by jurisdiction. So instead of having central repositories for “property tax information,” a single county website may be your only option. And even finding that isn’t quite as easy as it seems (we’ll get to that later).

Property tax is a complex world where exceptions are the rule. These rules can vary by jurisdiction, and no two places refer to the same thing in the same way! There are in-depth publications and countless county websites that define their own unique property tax terminology, however, we decided to condense all that information into some core concepts that, once you know them, will help you navigate more proficiently through these complexities.

For companies of all sizes, handling business personal property taxes can be a beast. Tracking hundreds or thousands of tangible assets is challenging enough; on top of that, there are deadlines (often multiple ones!) to manage, returns to prepare, protest decisions to be made, and bills to pay. And when one cycle is complete, it’s time to turn around and start again. 

Do you wish you could change the property tax software you use? If so, I bet I know what usually comes on the heels of that thought: visions of a painful, long system setup and data migration process, hours of retraining on a new system, and finding more workarounds for software that doesn’t quite fit your needs. Basically—a nightmare.