Rising to Success: How a Leading Global Manufacturer Tackled Their Tax Provisioning With Longview Tax

The Challenge

Back in 2009 the parent company of a leading US-based, global manufacturer implemented Longview Tax. The Longview Tax Solution replaced a cumbersome and inefficient Excel-based system with a more flexible solution that was able to more effectively handle the needs of a business with numerous foreign subsidiaries and an active mergers and acquisitions program.

In 2020, the parent company sold off the manufacturer and it became an independent business. While preparing for the company’s separation, the director of tax technology knew he didn’t want to return to a spreadsheet-based provisioning process because he felt this would have opened up the business to a lot of unnecessary risk. With multiple spreadsheet files to manage, the team would have been exposed to the risk of errors caused by manual processes, as well as lacking version control over their data. From experience when he worked for the parent company, the director of tax technology knew that Longview Tax would avoid all these issues. He said it enabled them to fulfill exactly what they wanted–having a system that would capture all their provisions and provide visibility through purpose-built reports and web-based dashboards.

Building to Success with Longview Tax

The director of tax technology was able to take what had been implemented in Longview Tax previously as a starting point and began to adapt it to suit his new role. While the biggest challenge for implementation in his previous role was connecting the many General Ledgers from across the company into Longview, the opposite was true for his new role. Moving all the data into one GL in his new role created the opportunity for a more streamlined approach to data management, increasing usage of features such as automation, which could be fulfilled by Longview Tax.

Beyond their successful implementation of Longview Tax, the director of tax technology said that it is also being used outside of provisioning. He noted that some people use Longview for restructuring, pulling in restructuring currencies (from accrual and cash spend for example), into one project. This makes it easier for his team to analyze this data and says it is a good way to consolidate information worldwide.

Elsewhere, Longview Tax is being used as a data-collection tool, and the director of tax technology notes it is also being used to create templates for non-US audits. The director of tax technology explained it gives those at their head office the visibility to know which audit closed when, its outcome, and how this compares to what they expected, without having to ask for this information from whichever constituency it originated from.

Longview Tax functions at all levels of the company–it is even used to collect information for the annual report. This director of tax technology was impressed that they could use it and develop it for multiple levels of the organization for anything they needed.

Navigating Success with Longview Tax

Longview Tax made it easy for this leading global manufacturer to manage their provisioning process, including:

• Streamlining GL data collection–allowing head office employees deeper insight into the provisioning process.
• Easy transferal–once they became independent, it was a simple job to transfer the elements built in Longview Tax over to their new implementation.
• Easy to use–any new contributors could pick up Longview Tax with ease, thanks to its purpose-built features and web-based dashboards, rather than having to get up to speed with complex and cumbersome spreadsheet packages.