10 Tools for Tax Document Automation

From the July 2010 Issue

When I was approached by the editorial staff at CPATA to write an article on tax document automation, I immediately accepted the assignment. It wasn’t until I began to write this that I realized all of the different opportunities that exist for today’s tax practitioner to automate their tax documents. To help organize the discussion, I thought a practical way to approach it would be to identify the top 10 things to do to automate your tax documents through the four key stages of their life cycle: capturing, processing, storing and disseminating.

Before we begin our review of the 10 steps to tax document automation, I think this provides a good opportunity to answer one of the most frequently asked questions I receive about tax and accounting technology: “Why should I go paperless?” Well this review of tax document automation goes a long way towards answering that question. In order to take advantage of all the automation techniques we are going to review, you have to have your documents converted to a digital format, aka paperless. So keep that in mind as you review these techniques to improve the efficiency of your tax prep process with document automation.

TOP 10 TAX DOCUMENT AUTOMATION TOOLS