How does your firm or in-house tax team commit to high-quality transfer pricing documentation and keeping deadlines while compliance is exploding and budgets are dropping?
Transfer pricing efforts are moving away from value chain optimization and design to compliance, and multinationals realize that they cannot maintain the same budgets for transfer pricing documentation given the compliance increase in all territories they operate.
Microsoft Word
98% of all transfer pricing professionals use Microsoft (“MS”) Word for their documentation challenges. This is because we are talking about “documentation,” i.e., only very few professionals use MS Excel or MS PowerPoint for lengthy descriptions. Second, because of the price.
Of course, Microsoft never had the intention to become the number 1 tool for building transfer pricing documentation. They aren‘t even aware that they are the number 1 tax technology provider. MS Word is used because it can be used anywhere and for anything related to documentation.
Although MS Word does not give any guidance on how to build transfer pricing documentation, it can truly accelerate the building or updating of documentation due to advanced features such as copy, paste, find & replace, track change, inserting, integration with other office programs, instant help, navigation, etc.
Manual vs. Technology-driven workstreams
Due to the above-explained capabilities and costs of MS Word, most tax professionals are sticky in using MS Word for building and updating transfer pricing documentation.
As a transfer pricing technology provider, we have also learned this the hard way. Although many prospects appreciated the step-up in documentation quality and the UX / UI of our TPdoc solution, the biggest rejection reason was that the manual effort of building and updating master files and local files in MS Word was almost as quick compared to using TPdoc.
TPdoc update
With the release of our latest feature in TPdoc, we are convinced that these days are over. TPdoc builds master files and local files in less than a minute error-free. And the beauty of it all is that this build-up is done in your trusted MS Word environment. No more copy-pasting, no forced templating, and you have the full flexibility to use your own branded MS Word report.
Combined with TPdoc‘s roll forwards (or backward) from year to year, country to country, file to file, you will easily save 60-70% of the time compared to manually building files in MS Word, and we are aiming for eventually 90-95%. And … the time saving comes on top of the quality improvement.
Are you ready to demote MS Word from being the primary tool for building TP documentation to a simple reporting tool?
Book a meeting with one of our tax technology specialists via the button below. Do you want to challenge our time-saving promise? Book a free trial of TPdoc!
