Success Story - Labcorp

Challenge

Calling Labcorp’s federal compliance process unwieldy qualifies for understatement of the year. Federal M adjustments were piled together in a massive Excel workbook – and each of their 80-plus entities had its own tab bogged down with hundreds of data points and surplus clutter.

Adding insult to injury, the labor-intensive worksheet was manually populated and too large to effectively manage and maintain – earning it the moniker The Beast.

Extensive documentation sitting on a network drive supported federal workpapers, but provided no direct line-of-sight. Without audit trails to tax return amounts, the team lost time arduously tracking down source data.

And when it came time to populate adjustments into Corptax after weeks of prep in Excel, amounts were entered manually, burning up more time.

Labcorp realized:

• Maintaining independent datasets in Excel and Corptax left stakeholders without a single source of truth
• Moving and managing huge volumes of data was unsustainable and stole time from data analytics and tax planning
• The more they manually moved data and reconciled datasets over late nights and weekends, the more likely they were to lose, alter, or misappropriate data – and miss errors
  With countless moving parts, decentralized data, and questions leading Labcorp down rabbit holes, they decided to overhaul the process.

Solution

With Corptax doing its part to simplify the process, Labcorp wanted to streamline even further by incorporating Alteryx and aligning the data chain from SharePoint to Alteryx to Corptax. They built an Alteryx workflow to:

• Help identify critical supporting documents in SharePoint and bring them into one centralized workflow. These file names were ultimately carried through to the end Excel output ensuring they would always track back to supporting documentation.
• Perform the vast majority of calculations currently computed in Excel
• Create multiple output views to serve a variety of informational needs
• Import amounts directly into Corptax and Excel output simultaneously – making certain that data pushed into Corptax and offline Excel workpapers always matched
  • Used the CSC Corptax^® Connector for Alteryx to Import data into Corptax
  • Provided streamlined summary and detail outputs to Excel—compressed and aggregated to remove clutter
• Validate automated adjustments computed in Corptax with offline expectations to correct any mistakes in mapping and to create a logic to be used in the provision process

LabCorp also used PowerQuery and SharePoint to create a check and balance system that removed any risk of returns being changed after finalization and before filing.

Results

Labcorp’s Alteryx workflow lets the team move all of their federal adjustments automatically. Now, all manual and calculated Corptax data flows directly into their workpapers and Corptax at the same time, ensuring accuracy and saving time spent reconciling and untangling complex chains of data.

Any variances are easily tracked down; clear documentation and visibility to source and consolidated detail furnish fast, complete support.

Huge time-savings creates space for preparers to look harder at the numbers. And newfound federal compliance efficiencies help team members start state compliance sooner. This year, state returns were filed several days before 10.15, even with significant time invested in analyzing numbers on the return.

All in all, the team now:

• Eliminates manual movement of federal M adjustments from sources to workpapers and Corptax
• Easily maintains 12 organized tabs, reduced from 80 overloaded tabs
• Finishes 3.5 days sooner than prior year with no more nights and weekends
• Saves hundreds of hours in prep and review time while building confidence in the work product
• Uses time-savings to increase value-added activities such as tax planning and business partnering