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Get ready for another round of budget fun! Yep, it’s the time of the year again…

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It may put additional pressure on teams, but mostly, it offers a tremendous opportunity for tax leaders!

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It’s all about a placeholder!We have all been part of the exercise where FP&A / Controlling is chasing and challenging the tax team to have the budget for the upcoming year prepared. Multiple rounds of iterations and discussions between the stakeholders involved. Different budgeting techniques, like zero-based or activity-based budgeting (unfortunately very often the previous year's budget - X%). Sometimes even resulting in fights between departments that try to push costs to the other’s budget (which I in the end never understood as for the multinational this is a “left pocket right pocket” transaction).

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Looking at the budget of the in-house tax team, there are a couple of evergreen line items:

– Personnel costs

– Consulting and advisory fees

– Tax compliance & reporting (be it often shared with finance)– Audit defense costs

– Projects– Training and development

– Tax research and publications

– Travel and entertainment

– Professional membership fees

– Tax insurance costs (hot, new)Misc (often not accepted 😉)

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But hey… have you noticed what’s missing here? Yes, this is what the huge opportunity is about! The transformation of the tax function, including a tax software and technology placeholder should be in every budget. With an ever-growing list of global tax obligations, stricter filing requirements, shorter deadlines, higher penalties, unprecedented amounts of regulatory change, more complex regulations, more demanding stakeholders, more controversy, higher risk exposure (and I can go on and on)... the momentum has never been higher to transform your tax function. To ensure it is future-proof. For this, technology plays a crucial role.

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To all tax leaders out there, submitting their budgets these days: make sure your technology placeholder is included!

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Good luck!