ONESOURCE helps the mid-Atlantic’s largest accounting firm better serve its clients

Achieving a holistic tax technology approach using ONESOURCE products

When working with clients, Sorrentino uses a number of ONESOURCE products, including Tax Provision, Income Tax, Dataflow, and the entire Workflow Manager suite. To achieve what he calls a “holistic tax technology approach,” he typically uses Dataflow to gather and organize a client’s data, then feeds the data into Tax Provision and Income Tax. Sorrentino says uses ONESOURCE this way because “My clients tend to struggle with getting data in a good, usable fashion that they can reuse for different parts of the tax lifecycle.”

When clients come to GTM for help, they are often aware that they are spending a great deal of time manually manipulating their data, copying and pasting between disjointed Excel files, then trying to figure out why the files are not tying together because of broken links or formulas. Much of their time is spent troubleshooting, he says, and in the meantime they are falling behind and pressure is mounting. The 2019 tax season took many of his clients by surprise too, he says, because they underestimated the time it would take to meet new international compliance requirements.

“I think it shocked people when they saw a 30 percent increase on average [in compliance reporting],” he says.

Getting clients back on track

Sorrentino has a process to get clients back on track.

• Data collection and streamlining of workflows
• Integrating the entire tax process through the ONESOURCE platform.

In ONESOURCE, he says, “You can use Dataflow to migrate existing Excel workpapers into the software, then integrate it with the other ONESOURCE products. Once my clients get the products they license integrated, that tends to automate the process and streamline the tax cycle.”

ONESOURCE helps GTM clients save time and money

Time savings: The most obvious and immediate result of this streamlining is an abundance of saved time. According to Sorrentino, one new public company he transferred to a ONESOURCE platform cut three weeks off their close, and another shaved 80 hours off of their annual provision process. “That extra time allows clients to spend their time on more value-added areas of tax—such as analysis and planning opportunities—as opposed to spending that time on compiling the data,” Sorrentino says.

Monetary savings:  Last year, one of Sorrentino’s clients used an automated data transfer into the ONESOURCE Income Tax module to file a quick return at the end of February that netted the company an IRS return “in the hundreds of millions of dollars.”

Centralizing multiple tax applications into a single, streamlined process

Clients aren’t the only people Sorrentino works with who use ONESOURCE; his company, GTM, operates on the platform as well. The reason, he says, is that ONESOURCE makes it easy to centralize multiple different tax applications into a single, seamless system. “On the indirect side, it’s having the sales and use products,” he explains. “On the direct side, it’s [being able to] streamline the process from the compliance software to the provision software, then utilize the Workflow Manager to manage the different workflows and automate the review process and sign-offs.”

Another by-product of using ONESOURCE is that it has confirmed how accurate GTM’s previous Excel models were. “Using International Tax Calculator internally at GTM, we’ve really been able to validate that our Excel models are working and transition off of those Excel models onto the automated solution that ONESOURCE provides,” he says.

The confidence GTM has in its models, along with the ability to customize ONESOURCE solutions for clients, has helped make GTM the largest and most successful accounting firms in the mid-Atlantic region.