Has the government changed its policy on live-animal exports to Indonesia? Has the ATO increased fuel tax credits? When will the ATO start benchmarking coffee shops?
More than 300 “tax events” occur each year which could materially impact the amount of tax your clients pay.
Wolters Kluwer-CCH Australia has released a predictive intelligence module for its cloud practice management suite, iFirm, which works out which clients will be affected by a single event.
iFirm highlights the client, explains which event has occurred and the implicated tax field. An accountant can choose to make a note to adjust the client’s file, increasing the accuracy of the final assessment. Or the accountant could proactively call the client, explain the situation and propose a range of solutions, resulting in more consulting work.
How it works
The quality of the intelligence relies on information gathered by CCH Australia’s publishing team. The team is best known for CCH’s Master Tax Guide and now works in other areas such as the iKnow content platform and Intelliconnect information search.
On the software side, CCH has integrated ATO benchmarks into its iFirm platform which includes the iFirm Tax Online module.
In the example of a change to fuel tax credits, iFirm creates a list of all clients that have claimed a fuel tax credit on their business activity statements (BASes). Likewise, ATO’s decision to benchmark coffee shops would create a list of clients in the hospitality industry.
The software can create a news-driven search on any field in a BAS or tax return and flag clients that have entered data in that field.
iFirm then creates a job against that list with suggested actions for the accountant to follow up.
A summary appears on iFirm’s dashboard showing the number of clients affected, and the level of impact (low to high) for the firm globally and for the individual client.
The idea behind the module is to increase job flow, says Pete Sanders, managing director of CCH’s accounting professionals division.
“The job might be a simple review. This module could generate new revenue for clients throughout the year,” Sanders says.
The IQ predictive intelligence module is a clever marrying of CCH’s established information skills and its ambitions in practice management software. It was conceived and driven by Dan Wyner, CCH’s head of strategy, and is one of several new tools launched by CCH in recent months. (More coverage to follow.)
“We’re trying to give them the tools to have the right conversations,” Sanders says.
The iQ module is in beta this quarter and will launch to the public in Q1.
The CCH iQ module was previewed this week at the independent accounting technology conference ATSA 2015 in Sydney. You can watch the session Growing Your Firm with Predictive Intelligence through ATSA’s pay-per-view video service.
