Indirect Tax Calculations in Alteryx

In this workflow, you will blend multiple streams of data to manage regional variances in sales tax computations and reporting. Check out the full, finance analytics starter kit: www.alteryx.co...
Finance analysts often have to account for regional variations in tax planning and rates. In spreadsheets, this would involve juggling multiple VLOOKUPs and pivot tables to try and get the data in the correct format for tax planning, but with Alteryx Designer, we can demonstrate a simpler end-to-end calculation process that handles both the complexities of messy real-world data as well as the uncertainties of dealing with missing or incomplete information.
We start by acquiring our data from the usual variety of data sources - perhaps a corporate database containing account and billing information, perhaps reference data from local files or from Government online portals: wherever your data resides, Alteryx has an easy, code-free way to bring it into your analysis.
For some data sources, we might need to prepare, enrich and cleanse the data before we develop our calculations. In this case, our subscription data may contain poorly formatted dates - we may need to filter out records based on specific time-ranges or values, and we may want to augment our dataset with new columns that provide specific value - all of this available through our interactive formula builder.
Data blending allows us to match our subscriber's location with our spatial reference data: with indirect tax, it’s critical to know a subscriber’s home state so we can correctly calculate the taxes that are due. This blending stage can be so critical because it’s often at this point that spreadsheets let us down and we lose information. With Alteryx Designer, we can clearly see records that haven’t blended successfully - hundreds of subscribers that don’t have a current ZIP code in their account details, and we can summarize and recombine this information using simple, code-free capabilities to apportion the unknown component proportionally across all our billed states.
We blend in our local state tax rates using the equivalent of a VLOOKUP (but without any of the headaches of management and scripting) and proceed to generate our individual tax calculation per State. Once our analysis is complete, we can distribute the resulting tax liabilities in all the usual formats: static PDF or a spreadsheet (perhaps to be emailed to our financial controllers) or perhaps to an interactive dashboard provided either by Alteryx or one of our Business Intelligence partners for further analysis.
This scenario takes a common challenge in the Office of Finance and replaces a very manual set of tasks (often with associated data quality problems and lack of audibility and oversight) with a fully repeatable visual workflow that highlights data issues for reconciliation and delivers an end-to-end process that wins analysts their day back!
Check out the full, finance analytics starter kit: www.alteryx.co...