Using Software to Align Tax, Legal & Finance

While your tax, legal, and finance teams fulfill distinct responsibilities within your organization, these departments also rely on one another. 

If your teams work well together, your day-to-day operations will be agile and efficient. Conversely, a lack of effective collaboration between these departments can hinder productivity, lead to compliance issues, and undermine your company’s ability to grow.

In most cases, collaboration issues can be attributed to a lack of company alignment. If you want to maximize the productivity of tax, legal, and finance, all three departments must be in line with organizational leadership. 

If company alignment issues go unaddressed, your business will encounter numerous hurdles. Fortunately, you can use software to align tax, legal, finance, and compliance processes into a harmonized framework built on collaboration and communication. 

Challenges Associated with Poor Company Alignment

Before focusing on the role that cloud-based business software plays in company alignment, it is important to understand just how severe the effects of misalignment can be.

When your tax, legal, and finance departments are misaligned, you may experience challenges such as:

A Diminished Corporate Culture

A lack of alignment between these three essential departments will have a trickle-down effect that impacts the culture throughout your entire company. 

On their own, legal, finance, and tax departments have a profound impact on other teams’ abilities to fulfill their responsibilities. If just one of these departments is underperforming due to alignment issues, the organization will suffer. 

Remedying this issue requires a multifaceted approach. Organizational leadership must repair the culture by clearly defining the company’s values, mission, and overarching goals. Additionally, they must invest in the right business software and resources so that tax, legal, and finance teams have the resources they need to be successful. 

Compliance Violations

Seemingly every year, new compliance regulations are enacted. Ensuring that your business adheres to these emerging regulations is critical for maintaining compliance and avoiding financial penalties. 

While your compliance team must ensure adherence to these regulations, it relies on your tax, legal, and finance teams to fulfill this responsibility. Compliance issues will abound when these teams are not on the same page. A lack of compliance can harm your brand’s reputation and lead to hefty penalties. 

Reduced Productivity

Although tax, legal, and finance departments have unique responsibilities, these entities should not operate in a compartmentalized fashion. Instead, they should function as pieces of the same puzzle, supporting one another in order to achieve their respective goals while furthering the company’s mission.

However, a lack of alignment between these teams will make it virtually impossible for them to collaborate effectively. In turn, this will lead to reduced productivity. Ongoing productivity issues can cost your organization tens of thousands while straining relationships with vendors and other stakeholders. 

Friction Between Teams

When tax, legal, and finance departments operate as compartmentalized entities, members of each team will eventually develop an oppositional attitude toward one another. They will fight to obtain the support they need to fulfill their responsibilities. 

For instance, suppose that one of the senior members of your legal operations department is preparing essential disclosure documents for environmental, social, and governance compliance. 

In order to complete these documents, they need a detailed report from your finance department. Since these teams operate on disparate systems and are not aligned, the legal ops staff member must request the needed information via email.

However, the finance department is bogged down as they are working on another project. As a result, the email recipient does not provide the required report for two days. This delay hinders the productivity of the legal department and causes friction between the two teams. 

How You Can Achieve Alignment with Cloud-Based Business Software

Cloud-based entity management software will enable you to optimize company alignment, increase interdepartmental collaboration, and reduce friction between tax, legal, and finance.

This technology aggregates the data used by your company’s essential teams. After deploying cloud-based entity management software, your departments will all operate from the same interface. They can effortlessly access critical data, exchange information, and work together on important deliverables. 

Cloud-based entity management software also prevents frustrating delays and miscommunications from causing strain between your teams. 

Your personnel will no longer have to wait hours or days to receive information from other departments. Instead, they can access this vital information in minutes without hindering the productivity of other teams. 

Demo Athennian’s Entity Management Software

Adopting modern entity management software will empower you to enhance company alignment, thereby improving business performance, productivity, and profitability. However, it is vital that you choose the right entity management software for your organization. 

While there are several such solutions on the market, only Athennian’s entity management software has maintained a five-star rating since its launch. Our client base is constantly expanding for one simple reason: Our dynamic technology suite delivers maximum value to our clients. 

With an integrated business software system at your service, you can automate redundant entity management processes. More importantly, you can improve interdepartmental visibility between legal, tax, and finance teams. In turn, this will pave the way for seamless collaboration and communication. 

At Athennian, we know that the needs of every client are unique. That is why we don’t offer generic software demonstrations. Instead, we will discuss your company’s needs and challenges so that we can customize the demo to address your biggest pain points.

Connect with an entity management expert today to arrange your custom demo.