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Accounting

Empire Suite Announces Availability of Automated Tax Scheduling

Empire ATS helps accounting firms minimize the total cost of tax compliance work and maximize profits. This is accomplished by making sure the right resources are assigned to each return based on business sector expertise, client experience, staff ...

WSG Systems Corp. has announced the general availability of Empire AUTOMATED TAX SCHEDULING (ATS), a cloud-based AI driven tax compliance scheduling system for accounting firms. Empire ATS helps accounting firms minimize the total cost of tax compliance work and maximize profits. This is accomplished by making sure the right resources are assigned to each return based on business sector expertise, client experience, staff efficiency, employee costs and form filing dates, as well as availability.

This announcement coincides with CPA Practice Advisor naming Empire ATS a CPA Practice Advisor 2020 Innovation Award Finalist. New Empire ATS adds to a major upgrade across Empire SUITE, WSG Systems’ cloud-based software created with the modern remote workforce in mind to support planning, productivity and forecasting objectives. Empire SUITE solutions help businesses gain efficiency, meet project deadlines and accomplish higher value goals with their staff through optimized scheduling and nearly effortless time and expense entry.

Empire ATS gives organizations the power to improve:

  • Workload forecast accuracy
  • Staff utilization
  • Workload compression
  • Employee efficiency

Workforce and Workload Challenges
Scheduling staff around tax return deadlines is complicated by several factors, including missing information, different return types and shifting priorities. Now firms can improve their profits by optimizing staff schedules using multiple variables:

  1. Employee efficiency: For example, a 2nd year associate should be able to complete a 1040 faster than a 1st year associate
  2. Prior experience with the client or business sector: For example, one preparer may be proficient with fast food chain returns while another might be proficient with car dealer returns
  3. Return priorities – Form 1120s are due a month before Form 1040s
  4. Cost of the different employees available

According to Bill Cornfield, CEO of Empire SUITE, “Empire ATS is unlike other tax scheduling software offered in that it is a fully automated process relying on Artificial Intelligence and does not require manual intervention to create an optimized schedule. Before the arrival of our algorithm-based technology that can sift through millions to billions of permutations to produce an optimized schedule, firms had little or n  control over scheduling. Now Managing Partners and Firm Administrators can be confident they are meeting the needs of their clients with an AI-based iterative process that matches the best tax preparers for the job, not just who’s available from the pool,” added Cornfield.

Additional Advantages

  • Employees are happier because the workload is spread more efficiently across the organization, and clients are happier because optimized schedules reduce the need for filing extensions
  • Empire ATS is seamlessly integrated with Empire TIME OFF so managers can see how requested and approved regulatory and non-regulatory leaves will affect their project deliverables.
  • User configurable calendar views help managers better visualize optimized staff schedule