The holidays are meant to be a time of joy. While that may be true in our personal lives, work is another matter. Businesses are often scrambling to handle last-minute tax matters and plan for the year ahead.
If you’re one such business looking to alleviate some of this stress and ensure nothing slips through the cracks, check out the following tax planning strategies (for companies of any size).
7 Tax Planning Strategies For Companies
1. Keep up with changes in federal and state laws.
Tax laws and exceptions can change from time to time. Global events, such as the pandemic, are a good example of how a slew of changes can happen in a single calendar year. Some changes may ease your tax processes, while others may actually make them more complex.
For example, state laws are particularly relevant to property taxes—not to mention jurisdictional requirements. Historically, a state may have required you to show up in person for an appeal hearing, but they may change that to allow for phone calls or written responses. Knowing this information would save time when appealing valuations.
2. Reduce paper and data entry in your business processes.
While you can’t always avoid paper from third parties, you do have control over your company’s paper usage. If you’re like most companies impacted by the pandemic, you had to adopt remote work practices. In a remote work world, paper is a huge hassle, as you likely experienced for yourself.
Property taxes, for example, are notorious for having many paper-based processes. Assessors and tax collectors send paper tax documents, such as assessment notices, hearing notices, and bills, through the mail. You then must enter data from those documents in your system and respond in kind with physical documents.
Now’s the time to phase out these aspects as much as possible to free up time for your team to focus on more important corporate year-end tax planning. You can start with MetaTaskerPT, an advanced data extraction tool and Anybill, a third-party tax payment service. MetaTaskerPT virtually eliminates data entry for standard property tax documents, while Anybill handles tax payments for you.
3. Purchase business assets early.
Whether it’s manufacturing equipment, office supplies, software, or another asset, consider purchasing these items prior to the year’s end. Doing so can reduce your tax burden, which is especially helpful if you know this tax year will be more profitable than next year.
4. Be aware of tax deadlines.
If you want to avoid penalties, it’s essential you know exactly when your taxes are due. With property taxes, every state—and sometimes individual jurisdictions—has its own set of due dates for returns, appeals, and tax bills. This makes dealing with property taxes a year-round affair, though late spring tends to have the highest concentration of deadlines across the country.
You can easily keep up with numerous deadlines in TotalPropertyTax (TPT), smart property tax software. TPT’s tax calendar can help your team track and stay ahead of deadlines. The calendar automatically populates with relevant due dates, and our team even validates these dates every year for returns and tax bills.
5. Ensure you have accurate tax information.
Are you filling out the right forms? Are those forms up to date? Are you using appropriate depreciation schedules for your assets?
These are all questions you need clear answers to so you can avoid submission delays and penalties. Do your research or let TPT do it for you. Our solution makes available the latest property tax return forms and depreciation schedules for jurisdictions across the country.
6. Confirm recipient locations.
Make sure you’re sending your completed tax documents to the right place. For example, property tax assessors and tax collectors often have different addresses—you may even need to send bill payments to multiple collectors. TPT gives you assurance that you’re always sending your tax documents where they need to go.
7. Review the security of your tax systems.
Even if you’ve been using an acceptable tax system for years, new corporate guidelines may render that system unacceptable due to more stringent security concerns. For example, you may need a solution that is SOC 1 compliant and single-tenant like TPT.
Supercharge Your Business Tax Planning With Tailored Property Tax Software
CrowdReason makes property tax planning for companies a breeze. We provide the solutions—and the support—you need for conquering the entire property tax process. Our team members have extensive experience with property taxes—we’ve filed returns, appealed valuations, and managed tax bills. As a result, we understand what you’re trying to accomplish and have designed our software to handle nearly any challenge you can throw at it.
MetaTaskerPT makes data entry a thing of the past. TotalPropertyTax helps you track deadlines, identify assessment reduction opportunities, reduce return filing time, and make more informed tax decisions. Combined, these solutions help you generate unparalleled efficiencies in the property tax cycle.
Come join the crowd of happy clients who are conquering their property taxes with our tax automation software. Schedule a demo today.
