Success Story - News Corporation

Challenge

A few employees at News Corporation’s (News Corp) headquarters held the huge responsibility of coordinating and importing trial balances for more than 600 entities across 12 business units—all using separate ERP systems.

Without daily involvement in each unit’s operations, the employees spent weeks obtaining, processing, and reconciling all 12 sets of unique financials. This entailed making educated guesses to properly map new trial balance accounts in the tax software—leading to an inconsistent approach across entities and years. When all was said and done, it took News Corp more than a month to import their trial balances, creating bottlenecks for downstream international and domestic compliance teams.

Solution

News Corp decided to “decentralize the process and leverage CSC Corptax^® power to give business units autonomy”—and provided a standard import template to all business units, equipped with:

• Gated/locked data and cells designed to promote consistency and proper segmentation of domestic and international data via Corptax-provided cases
• Mapping for BEPS Country-by-Country Reporting (CbCR) incorporated into the same Excel file
• Two-way Point-of-View (POV) and CSC Corptax^® Office connections to not only import data, but see output of that data within workpapers concurrently

Result

Now, each business unit executes their respective trial balance process in-house, allowing them to:

• Take ownership of their financial data with ability to fully vet account mappings and balances in the context of their unique circumstances
• Flag year-over-year and entity-to-entity inconsistencies via real-time connections to Corptax data
• Review GL and BEPS CbCR balances/reclasses in real-time in same workpaper used to import data—no need to enter system
• Increase contributions to the consolidation process by fully engaging with the tax software

Meanwhile, back at headquarters, the team:

• Saves 4+ weeks on the trial balance process and 3+ weeks on tax return prep
• Gains confidence in correctness of account mappings and completeness of data
• Gets time back to “elevate their roles as reviewers vs. preparers” and focus on impactful activities:
  • Feed readily accessible Corptax info into Alteryx workflows
  • Break new ground by visualizing data in dashboards to support reviews and planning