Success Story - Curran Group, Inc.

Challenge

Achieving work-life balance was the driving force behind Curran Group’s mission to “find the fastest way to get work done, automate as much as possible, and get home by dark during Chicago winters.” The two-person team wanted to streamline compliance by automating manual account lookup, data entry, and calculations—and more quickly gather data for requests from external parties such as the U.S. Census Bureau.

On the planning front, Curran Group operates in close to 50 states, but they hadn’t optimized their filing footprint and structure—and were uncertain about ROI for doing so. Tax wanted to do a feasibility study to know if a change in location and/or filing election for five companies would be tax-beneficial and drive savings.

Solution

Curran Group fully leveraged Corptax Office POV’s push/pull functions to accelerate compliance and conduct a study to understand tax and cost ramifications around company location and filing elections.

Result

Compliance: Using Corptax Office, Curran Group saves numerous hours of manual work and reduces errors by relying on a “single set of truth.” Specifically, they pull out thousands of state and federal return adjustments for ~400 returns in a click. Then, they quickly calculate current-year adjustments, compare them to prior-year, and push into Corptax—all in seconds.

In addition to helping with returns, Corptax automates extensions and estimates, giving the team more time to review.

And furnishing the U.S. Census Bureau with data for 10 surveys used to take up to 20 hours per survey. Now, Curran simply queries Office for needed information and gets it in seconds.

Planning: To better understand the significance of company location and filing election, Curran Group used Corptax Office to do extensive scenario-testing. They set up individual cases to keep test data separate from return data. By quickly extracting specific info, changing inputs in Excel, and pushing into Corptax, they rapidly performed a variety of hypotheticals around questions such as: What happens if we file unitary in this state or that state—or stay separate? What happens if we relocate people and operations to this state?

The study took just 30 minutes, and they were astounded to discover the potential for “astronomical” savings.

Curran presented their findings to the controller and CEO who were equally surprised by the cost differentials. As a result of the study by Tax, management is looking more closely at different proposals.

Curran felt the speed with which Office facilitated the analysis made the study possible, saying “If it hadn’t been so fast, we might not have attempted the study to figure it all out—Office made all the difference.”

In short, Corptax gives Curran Group more time to analyze data, do critical thinking, and create tangible value for the company. Corptax Office helped the team:

• Save 200 hours and $10,000 by automating compliance processes
• Spend 30 minutes vs. 25 hours performing the State Feasibility Study
• Spend mere minutes vs. ~110 hours extracting data for 10 U.S. Census surveys