Case study
How ONESOURCE helped one company unify its global tax operations and prepare it for the future
Sandy Faulkner is the tax director for Jeld-Wen Inc., a global manufacturer of high-quality doors and windows based in Charlotte, North Carolina. Faulker is responsible for overseeing Jeld-Wen’s global tax reporting and compliance functions, which encompass operations in 23 countries and various jurisdictions within those locales.
To manage all of those responsibilities, Faulkner relies almost exclusively on the ONESOURCE suite of products, including Income Tax, Tax Provision, Dataflow, Workflow, Calendar, Transfer Pricing, Determination, and Checkpoint Edge. “We’ve really turned into a ONESOURCE shop,” she says. “We did evaluate many vendors, but chose ONESOURCE for the options and automation, and for the platform we could use across those solutions.”
ONESOURCE: Jeld-Wen’s “one stop shop”
Prior to converting its operations to ONESOURCE, Jeld-Wen tried to develop an Excel-based system on its own, but the global nature of the business and an increasingly complicated international tax landscape made the task almost impossible. “It quickly became an Excel challenge of the greatest magnitude,” Faulkner recalls. “It’s really challenging not to have automation tools that can speak to each other.”
Now that her teams are proficient in using ONESOURCE’s integrated platform, however, combining reports, tools, and schedules around the globe is much easier. For example, Jeld-Wen now funnels all of its global tax reporting through Workflow and Calendar, which has eliminated the confusing mix of “side calculations and calendars” that Faulkner’s teams used to rely on, and has instead consolidated them into a single tool. This change “has been extremely well received,” she says, because her teams around the world now have “one source of truth.”
Time savings and efficiencies using ONESOURCE
Faulkner estimates that the efficiencies and time savings achieved using ONESOURCE have allowed her team to gain at least a week in their close process, plus giving the company considerably more insight into how its entire tax picture comes together. More streamlining is still possible, Faulkner insists, and the time savings have given her team the luxury of being prepared when crunch time hits. “The great part is that we are now in a position where we’re ready, and we can nimbly move when the accounting team has late changes,” she says.
Managing regulatory challenges of a global company
Like every other multinational, Faulkner and Jeld-Wen are still grappling with all the complexities and requirements of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, as well as new regulations resulting from changes in federal and state law—the Wayfair decision, for instance—and, internationally, the Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development’s (OECD) Base Erosion and Profit-Shifting (BEPS) initiative.
“We’re a global company, so the BEPS initiative really affects us,” says Faulkner. She and her team use ONESOURCE Transfer Pricing and Checkpoint Edge to help understand, prepare for, and meet all the new BEPS tax requirements. “Gathering that information globally, in the way the various countries want to see it, is a challenging process,” she says, “but we have help in managing it through the tools we have.”
Clear roadmap for the technology journey
Considering that the international tax picture is not going to simplify itself anytime soon, Faulkner is relieved that she and her team have the tools in place to meet the challenges ahead. “Now we have a roadmap for our technology journey,” she says. “Before, we weren’t really sure where we were headed. We were honestly just trying to get through it. But now that we have a technology framework and foundation that we feel really good about, we can look ahead to what’s next.”
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