For companies of all sizes, handling business personal property taxes can be a beast.

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.

By now, just about every industry has found a way to incorporate robotic process automation (RPA) into its workflow, but so far, banks are leading the way. Why? Because succeeding in today’s global financial markets requires “unprecedented levels of speed, accuracy, and cost efficiency beyond what a human workforce can provide.”

The typical tax cycle can be daunting: filing returns for your business personal property (BPP), keeping up with notices of assessment for BPP and real estate, handling valuation appeals, and paying tax bills. You can easily have 1,500 returns; 90 notices; and 50 bills due next month. It’s enough to keep you and your tax team working overtime, especially if your strategy is reactive, so that you’re only taking action after you receive tax documents in the mail.

Regardless of your industry, your tax workflow is probably largely comprised of research and data entry tasks: keeping track of your assets and their location, retrieving appropriate depreciation schedules, filling out business personal property tax returns, reviewing valuation notices, and paying tax bills. A substantial amount of time and effort goes into tax preparation office procedures.

There are a variety of tax research tools available, all of which aim to give you the most up-to-date tax information so you can prepare accurate returns and make informed tax decisions. But the best tax research software solutions provide a range of features that not only keep you informed, but also make your tax workflows more efficient.

If your business has locations in multiple cities or states, you could benefit from tax preparation outsourcing—having a third party or software solution handle one or more areas of your property tax cycle. Outsourcing is an appropriate solution for teams that:

You’ve just received an assessment notice for one of your commercial properties—now what? If the amount seems too high, hopefully you or another member of your property tax team will check the accuracy of the valuation by using one or more commercial property valuation methods, and then appeal if need be.

Cost reductions, efficiency gains, greater accuracy… these value propositions and more have long been drivers of change within organizations. From its earliest stages, automation has promised to deliver these benefits in spades. The idea of reducing human labor while at the same time transforming a business process for the better is why business leaders were attracted to automation from the start—and why many continue to view it as essential to organizational growth. 

Looking for ways to make your property tax management process more efficient? Given the magnitude and complexity of the various aspects of property tax—and the fact that corporate tax teams are increasingly being asked to do more with fewer resources—it’s no wonder.