BESIX Watpac - Case Study CCH Integrator

Tax technology innovation for systems and controls

BESIX Watpac is the result of the merging of two great companies – the global BESIX Group headquartered in Belgium and one of Australia’s most high-profile construction firms, Watpac. Today, BESIX Watpac redefines construction through its vast international experience, expertise and financial strength to deliver large-scale complex infrastructure projects.

Challenge

Simplifying standardised tax reporting for better outcomes

The BESIX Watpac tax function supports international tax compliance and reporting requirements for 15 different local entities throughout Australia and New Zealand. Historically the tax and finance team processed tax calculations and reports with electronic spreadsheets. Now, however, with a continued emphasis on governance – and inevitably an increase in global reporting requirements – BESIX Watpac realised it would benefit from a specialist data management platform for tax calculations, reporting and compliance.

BESIX Watpac relied on multiple spreadsheets for tax compliance and reporting. These spreadsheets didn’t always provide transparency into the underlying numbers given linking errors, which made it hard to verify and understand where they were coming from. As BESIX Watpac moved into quarterly tax provision calculations, it was inevitable that the discussion around potential error rates, manual entry issues, and workloads would become more critical.

The company completed a market assessment of tax technologies, building on its vision to find a platform to better support its growing taxation reporting needs and accelerated deadlines. This tax technology would also need to support tax risk management to meet the demands of taxation assurance reviews and the ATO’s Justified Trust initiative.

BESIX Watpac also wanted to ensure its taxation calculations would be automatically rolled forward from one financial year to the next.

Solution

Creating a roadmap for flexible reporting and valuable insights

BESIX Watpac completed a review of competitive market offerings to help deliver on its vision for best practice tax governance.

“There was already support for CCH Integrator internally and an appreciation of how it could improve our governance and processes. Another key factor in CCH Integrator’s favour was its ability to keep up with increased calculations and reporting requirements,” Genna outlined.

Today BESIX Watpac trusts CCH Integrator to support its long-term commitment to quality taxation compliance and reporting. As a multi-jurisdictional tax technology platform, CCH Integrator delivers the data needed by the relevant taxation authorities in Australia and New Zealand.

Benefits

CCH Integrator halves calculation time and extends reporting capabilities

BESIX Watpac is now benefiting from the rapid reporting capabilities CCH Integrator can deliver. It has created substantial savings in relation to its quarterly tax calculation timeframe as well as providing reports that can drill down to an individual company basis, which would have been significantly more time consuming using the previous spreadsheet templates. For Genna, reporting at different levels outside of the consolidated group was entirely ‘unexpected and a massive benefit to doing this at the click of a button’.

Additionally, when the business needs to complete live calculations in CCH Integrator, the review process ensures it captures any potential errors from any source spreadsheets.

BESIX Watpac forecast the Country-by-Country capabilities for CCH Integrator will also prove invaluable.

“As part of our phased rollout, we are implementing CCH Integrator and embedding it within the team. Once we have our first full financial year of reporting under our belt, we will look at adding any additional capabilities, like automated Country-by-Country reporting,” she says.

The implementation of CCH Integrator was also a highlight of the new tax technology system.

CCH Integrator

From one person to multinational teams, CCH Integrator streamlines the complexity of tax compliance and reporting across multiple entities and jurisdictions, increasing control, reducing risk and freeing your tax function to focus on greater things.