Tax Filing Deadlines Don’t Wait: How Automation Keeps Your Team on Track

Is your tax team racing the clock every month or quarter to meet sales and use tax (SUT) filing deadlines? You’re not alone. As your business expands into more jurisdictions—each governed with its own rules, deadlines, and submission formats—keeping up with compliance has become a high-stakes challenge. And when filings are late or inaccurate, it can result in significant financial penalties as well as adverse impacts on organizational reputation.

The Pressure of Filing Deadlines

Indirect tax teams operate within a demanding environment characterized by a relentless cycle of monthly and quarterly sales and use tax filing deadlines to adhere to. The complexity of compliance multiplies for organizations conducting business across states, provinces, cities, and local jurisdictions. Beyond standard sales and use tax returns, specific industries are also required to submit supplemental forms to report transactions subject to special tax considerations. As a result, tax teams are challenged to continually manage:

• Accurate data collection from multiple and disparate systems
• Heavy reliance on IT resources to access and deliver the necessary data
• Reconciliation and validation of transactional tax data
• Tracking of jurisdiction-specific filing calendars, deadlines, and format requirements
• Manual preparation and prompt submission of returns to each jurisdiction
• Risk management strategies to minimize penalties and audits

This manual, deadline-driven process drains tax team resources and often leads to staff burnout, a heightened risk of errors, and reduced capacity to support strategic initiatives.

The Broader Impact of Manual Compliance

The burden of manual compliance extends beyond the tax team. IT departments are stretched thin managing fragmented systems and disparate tax technologies, while finance teams face increased audit risk and limited visibility into compliance activities. These inefficiencies drive up operational costs and hinder scalability, creating roadblocks to growth and transformation.

Why Automation Is the Game-Changer

Vertex Express Returns, an integrated add-on to the Vertex O Series Cloud tax engine, automates the creation of sales and use tax returns across the U.S. and Canada—helping you transform how your team manages compliance. Here’s how:

• Real-time data integration: Seamlessly connects with the O Series tax engine to pull accurate, up-to-date business configurations and transactional data for each filing period.
• Automated return preparation: Eliminates manual data entry, calculations, and formatting, reducing the risk of human error.
• Flexible, schedulable tax data import and returns creation: Enables users to manage returns according to business preferences. Saves time and schedule to automatically import tax data from O Series and generate returns each filing period (such as the first day of the month) or opt to manually initiate when ready to begin the review process.
• Flexible return format options: Simplifies submission by supporting both signature-ready PDFs for manual filing and EDI files for electronic filing (e-file).
• Multi-jurisdictional support: Keeps track of filing dates and submission forms including e-file formats, and supplemental and industry-specific forms, across jurisdictions.
• Return processing & workflow: Streamlines the process with a centralized returns interface that consolidates workload and enhances efficiency. Tracks return status, due dates, and urgency in one place, and customizes views to stay organized and on schedule for timely filings each period.
• Audit-ready documentation: Helps ensure consistency and transparency, making audits less stressful and more efficient.

Step Into Strategic Compliance

With automation, your tax team can shift from reactive deadline management to proactive planning. Instead of dreading the end of each month or quarter, they can approach filings with confidence, knowing the process is streamlined, accurate, and on time. Modern, cloud-based tax technology helps you stay compliant, reduce risk, and empower your team to focus on what really matters.

Don’t wait for the next deadline to make a change. Explore how Vertex Express Returns, powered by O Series Cloud can transform your tax operations—before it’s too late.