Required Income Tax Disclosures

Longview Tax produces all required tax disclosures immediately upon closing GAAP Pretax Income by legal entity. Longview Tax's unique architecture allows simultaneous and dynamic rollups of ASC 740 (FAS 109), and IAS 12 disclosures using one version of the underlying financial data. All disclosures are supported by easy-to-access details, by legal entity, and by jurisdiction, and are readily accessed using drill-down functionality.

Importantly, the IAS12 solution is not just a summary re-working of the ASC 740 (FAS 109) solution. Longview Tax has been architected from the ground-up to support the unique requirements under each GAAP.

Interim Reporting

As well as annual provision, Longview Tax has interim reporting to support ASC 740-270 (FIN18)  or IAS 34.  The interim reporting process provides the ability to forecast the estimated annualized ETR at the legal entity and consolidated level.  The interim reporting is seamlessly integrated with the annual provisioning process to provide powerful comparative analysis of the tax provision throughout the entire year.

Uncertain Tax Positions

Longview Tax allows tax departments to track uncertain tax positions by legal entity/by year, and calculate the necessary tax impact on the consolidated tax provision.  The Longview Tax Uncertain Tax Positions capability includes tracking detailed amounts for tax, interest, penalty and liability, summarizing these provision amounts, and producing a final adjusted deferred tax rollforward.

Out-of-the-Box Functionality

Longview Tax provides best practice functionality out-of-the-box. This includes standard process-flow, reports, and data collection templates. The importance of this is that customers can choose to leverage the standard functionality to ensure a solution is available in the shortest amount of time possible. However, you are not limited to the off-the-shelf functionality. The solution can be easily configured to customer and industry-specific requirements. This allows organizations to start with a very basic solution that evolves as your company grows and your tax processes become more streamline. A solution that is flexible enough to grow with you is imperative.

Tax Provisions by Jurisdiction

Longview Tax contains configurable functionality for the automated calculation of national/state/provincial income tax provisions and deferred taxes by legal entity for any and all taxing jurisdictions worldwide. Each jurisdiction's current and deferred tax provisions are calculated on a US or IFRS GAAP basis, including deferred tax assets and liabilities.

Industry-specific Functionality

Longview Tax can be configured to address complex industry and statutory requirements. The technology is specifically tailored to address industries such as regulated utilities (FERC), financial services, Insurance (SSAP10), oil & gas, and mining.  For example, for industries with statutory reporting requirements, Longview Tax effectively empowers you to maintain parallel and simultaneous provisions – one for GAAP reporting and one for statutory purposes. This allows a company to minimize “work-arounds” or external processing – thereby significantly improving the efficiency of provisioning.  Download the Longview Tax for Insurance brochure to learn more!

Integration with Book Data

Longview Tax takes a unique approach to the book data. By maintaining tight integration with the book trial balance Longview Tax ensures superior book to tax transparency. It easily accepts detailed beginning and ending trial balances by legal entity from any general ledger system (e.g. SAP, Oracle, JDE, etc) or other source (e.g. Hyperion, BCS, etc), regardless of the number of legal entities, or accounts. This data can be rolled up in multiple and different consolidations with the assurance that, at a global, consolidated level, the numbers reconcile to the source systems. As a result, you can instantaneously report your global results by legal entity, by jurisdiction, or even at management-level of detail immediately upon close.

Integration with Compliance

Just like the integration to the book data, integration to the compliance details is equally as important. Again Longview Tax takes a unique approach as compared to other offerings in the marketplace. Longview Tax offers best-in-breed integration with any compliance system to support full bi-directional sharing of data. Longview Tax provides the ability to easily maintain mappings between all major compliance systems. This integration allows for a streamlined provision to return true-up process.

Microsoft SharePoint Integration and Document Repository

Longview Tax has an integrated document repository that provides the ability to attach and view documents from your web tax packages and view attachments in web reports. Longview Tax integration with Microsoft SharePoint allows Longview data and documents to be leveraged in a SharePoint dashboard (eg. KPI’s, tables, graphs).  The SharePoint dashboard can contain links directly to Longview Tax reports, input templates or document lists and supports single sign-on.

Tax Consolidation/Entity Management

Longview Tax calculates and reports the consolidated/global income tax provision, by legal entity - no matter the type of entity - including the effects of any country or provincial/state tax sub-consolidations (U.K. group relief, Netherlands fiscal unity, U.S. consolidated or State combined or unitary group, etc.). The flexibility of entity structures allows Longview Tax to compute provisions that exactly match the entity consolidations as reflected in all of a company's global income tax returns/reports. This is one way that Longview Tax addresses the tax knowledge gap of global site controllers. They no longer need to understand the tax treatment of a foreign branch, disregarded entity, dual-resident corporation, partnerships, etc. in order to calculate accurate country provisions since these tax structures are already defined in Longview Tax.

Maintenance Wizards

Longview Tax includes easy-to-use tools that allow you to maintain your system as your company changes. The key tools are the Tax Differences Wizard, Legal Entity Wizards, User & User Group Wizards, and the Hierarchy Manager. Using the Legal entity wizards, users can add legal entities, partnerships, and branches from the web-based interface. Groups of legal entities can be quickly added from the “bulk entity-add” wizard. The Longview Hierarchy Manager supports simultaneous legal and management reporting views in a single environment. The Tax Difference Wizard includes built-in financial intelligence to understand balance-to-balance, trial balance pulls, and multi-jurisdictional non-deductibility factors.

Tax Internal Control Compliance

With built-in features to ensure strict internal tracking and control over all system activities, Longview Tax easily passes Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX), Canadian Multilateral Instrument 52-109 and European evaluations. Examples include:

• Assigned system access to all users based on their roles within the provisioning process;
• Tracking all users that have accessed the system;
• Identification of any users making changes to an entity structure or tax attribute;
• Tracking of data through the entire data collection and approval cycle, with time/date stamping and all associated users identified;
• Robust analysis and reporting, featuring a broad array of pre-built reports plus capability to easily create and view dynamic or static reports that are fully drillable and exportable to Excel.

Tax Data Warehouse

The Longview Tax Data Warehouse (TDW) is an incremental addition to the Longview Tax provision system. Using the Longview database the TDW provides a single, accurate version for all tax department data. The key benefits of a tax data warehouse are faster access to regularly used reports and queries, the ability to easily perform ad-hoc analysis, reduced time spent gathering manual data and reduced reliance on other departments for data. The Longview Tax Data Warehouse provides the following advantages:

• Single Repository of Tax Data – Expands on the Longview Tax core provision data solution for US GAAP and IFRS to include other relevant tax data.
• Longview Unified Platform – All Longview products use the same Longview Tax core platform. Thereby providing seamless integration of tax with enterprise-wide planning and data reporting data.
• Ease of Maintenance – The Longview Tax core platform provides an intuitive administrative client for the Tax administrator to perform the maintenance tasks. The tax department is not dependent on IT to perform these tasks.
• Analysis and Reporting – With faster access to regularly used reports and queries, reduced time for manual gathering of data, and the ability to perform ad-hoc analysis, the Longview
• Tax Data Warehouse provides sophisticated functionality to meet all tax data analysis and reporting needs.

Download the Longview Tax Data Warehouse brochure to learn more!

Hosted or Non-Hosted

You can choose to implement and use Longview Tax in one of two methods--the Longview Tax Software as a Service (SaaS) model or the installation of the solution on your company’s internal systems. The SaaS approach allows your tax department to forgo the typical interaction with internal IT infrastructure. Your team will access the solution over the internet, yet you can rest assured that your data is secure on Longview’s world-class hosting infrastructure. Alternatively, perhaps your organization chooses to keep the software in-house. The Longview Tax platform is time-tested and compliant with the rigid IT requirements within each company.

Training & Implementation

Longview's proven implementation methodology delivers timely and predictable results, and since knowledge transfer is critical to the success of every implementation, our Learning and Client Services teams work with you every step of the way to ensure your objectives are met. From developing training plans customized to your needs, to on-site architects and implementation staff, to web-based learning courses, our knowledgeable, industry veterans will ensure you derive maximum value from your investment.

Tax Service Providers

Many of the industry’s most respected audit and service firms are trained and experienced in implementing Longview Tax.  As well as implementing Longview Tax, these firms can provide many other value added services for your planned initiative.