Highlights
- Forrester found automation cut tax return preparation time by 50%, redirecting 10,000 hours a year for a composite organization.
- The study traces $275,000 in avoided annual compliance costs to late filings, resubmissions, error remediation, and consulting fees.
- Two avoided hires in year one grew to six by year three, alongside a 148% three-year ROI.
A recent Forrester Total Economic Impact study commissioned by Thomson Reuters benchmarks the financial return of automating direct tax—and the headline finding is a 148% three-year ROI with a payback period under six months. Here are the three tax automation benchmarks worth bringing into your next CFO meeting.
If you lead a corporate tax department, you’ve likely had some version of this conversation in the last 18 months. Finance is asking you to do more: more jurisdictions, more entities, more scrutiny, without proportional headcount. Meanwhile, your team is still spending the bulk of provision season reconciling spreadsheets that nobody trusts.
The question isn’t whether your team can work harder. It’s whether your operating model can scale with your business demands.
That’s why we commissioned Forrester Consulting to quantify the financial impact of tax automation and give tax leaders like you the data you need for these critical budget conversations. In November 2025, Forrester interviewed four enterprises using ONESOURCE direct tax and built a Total Economic Impact™ analysis modeled on a composite $10 billion-revenue organization with a 30-person tax department. The full study runs through the methodology in detail, but three numbers stand out—the kind of numbers that should change how you frame your next budget conversation.
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Number 1: 50% reduction in tax preparation time
Number 2: $275,000 in avoided compliance costs annually
Number 3: Two avoided hires per year as the business scales
Putting the three numbers together
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Number 1: 50% reduction in tax preparation time
The composite organization in the Forrester study cut its average tax return preparation time from 40 hours to 20. For a tax department filing 500 returns annually, that’s 10,000 hours redirected each year — the equivalent of nearly five full-time employees freed from manual reconciliation.
The driver isn’t just speed. It’s where those hours go. Interviewees consistently described the shift as moving their teams “from data entry to advisory.” One interviewee told Forrester that their team had “gone from reactive compliance to regulatory confidence and proactive insights.”
For tax leaders, this data point transforms how you approach capacity planning with your CFO. Headcount asks framed as “we need more capacity” rarely land. Headcount conversations framed as “here’s what our existing team can deliver if we stop spending half their time on reconciliation” tend to land differently.
The benchmark question for your team: how many hours does a typical return take today, and what percentage of that is genuine analysis versus data wrangling?
Number 2: $275,000 in avoided compliance costs annually
This is the number most tax leaders underestimate, because the costs are distributed. A late filing in one country, a resubmission in another, an extra week of advisor time during audit prep: none of them appear on a single line item in your budget. But they aggregate into a meaningful drag on the function.
The Forrester study traces these avoided costs to automation across four specific areas: late filing penalties, resubmission costs, error remediation, and consulting fees, totaling $275,000 annually for the composite organization. Over three years, that compounds to more than $600,000 in avoided spend, and the figure grows as the business expands into additional jurisdictions.
The senior director of finance and business operations at one of the interviewed software companies put it simply: their organization cut external advisory fees by half.
The benchmark question for your team: when was the last late filing, resubmission, or material error remediation, and what did it actually cost you in fees, advisor hours, and auditor scrutiny?
Number 3: Two avoided hires per year as the business scales
CFOs tend to sit up at this one.
The composite organization avoided hiring two additional tax professionals in year one—a number that grew to six cumulative avoided hires by year three as the business kept expanding into new jurisdictions and integrating acquisitions. At $100,000 per role, that’s more than $1.1 million in avoided headcount costs over three years, against a tax department that nonetheless took on more work.
The mechanism here is centralization. Interviewees told Forrester that the ONESOURCE direct tax solutions compliance logic, automated localization, and reusable templates allowed their teams to enter new jurisdictions without making local tax hires in each country. One senior director described it this way: their business stays scalable without adding headcount, and they can move into a new jurisdiction without hiring locally in each one.
For tax leaders inside companies with active M&A pipelines or international expansion plans, this is the number that connects tax operations to corporate strategy. It’s also the number that turns a technology purchase into a workforce planning conversation—which is a different and usually shorter approval path.
The benchmark question for your team: as your company expands or integrates acquisitions, are you adding tax headcount in each jurisdiction, or scaling centrally?
Putting the three numbers together
Individually, each figure tells part of the story. Together, they describe a different operating model for the corporate tax function: one where the team’s hours go to analysis instead of reconciliation, where compliance costs trend down as the business expands, and where global growth doesn’t require linear headcount growth.
The Forrester research aggregates these benefits into a 148% three-year ROI, $1.7 million in net present value, and a payback period of under six months for the composite organization. That return is the flip side of a cost most tax departments underestimate: what standing still is quietly costing them. Whether those specific figures translate to your environment depends on your starting point: your current tax preparation time, your jurisdictional footprint, your recent compliance history, your expansion trajectory.
The composite organization’s numbers are a starting point. The more useful exercise is mapping them against your own.
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