Client Overview: The client is a leading tax and audit firm in the US.
Challenge
Our client sought to automate the complicated partnership taxation of Private Equity, hedge funds and real estate, with numerous complicated scenarios demanding a scalable and repetitive calculation framework.
Solution
Orion developed a solution for the client to assist their partnership clients in determining allocations and Taxable Income and to allocate income items to the partners of those partnership clients. Orion designed a platform to support partnerships that own substantial operating businesses and have a significant number of partners and/or assets with the following capabilities:
- Institutional Knowledge: The knowledge needed to execute calculations, create allocations, maintain capital accounts, execute capital events, and create reports was stored in a central repository in the platform to ensure it was secure and available at an institutional level.
- Automated Integration. Facilitate direct integration with downstream systems (GoSystems, CCH, etc).
- User Interface and Experience: The system provided a seamless and painless user experience while running through all tax and allocation calculations accurately and with utmost speed.
- Multi-user workflow: The application processed all the calculations through a calculation engine that was not reliant on the user’s hardware. This allowed for a significant improvement in performance. Multiple users could also work together within a project at the same time.
- Projection Planning: In addition to being used as an end-to-end tax allocation system, the application also offered the ability for limited planning by allowing the user to copy over existing projects and make projections based on theoretical decisions that a partnership could make. Reports from this project could be used to provide clients with an estimate of the outcomes their decisions would create.
- Detailed audit/revision history: A revision history tool stored all changes made in the project, protecting against data being lost or accidently erased, and providing the ability to revert to original input data and prior versions if needed.
- Configurable permissions and access control. Administrative control over who can access what clients, projects, or reports as well as what rights they have to data and features.
- Powerful diagnostics capabilities to capture errors, warnings, and overrides up front. Reduce filing errors, configurable for all system inputs and calculations.
- Reporting: Using reporting and copied projects, a user could also potentially use the system for planning purposes by creating theoretical situations and running calculations to view the outcomes of these situations.
Impact
The client’s new comprehensive Partnership Tax Allocations & Aggregations Platform improved the accuracy of tax calculations and reduced data processing inefficiencies. It also improved collaboration with client stakeholders with more timely, transparent, and accurate data, and significantly improved their user experience and customer management. In addition, our client was able to do projection planning and generate multiple combinations of reports at an asset level, layer level, and partner interest level.
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