Vertex Exchange Europe 2018: Fortive and Vertex Tax Performance Engine

Mattijs Overbosch explains why Vertex was the obvious choice for Fortive

Transcript

Tax technology provider Vertex hosted a two day conference in April 2018, bringing their experts in tax and technology together with their partners and clients. European CEO joined them to learn about the tax compliance challenges that multinational businesses are facing, and the trends in technology and automation that are helping them manage. In this video, Mattijs Overbosch discusses Fortive’s need for a tax data management solution that would handle the company’s rapid inorganic expansion, and how Fortive’s finance department is handling the prevalent need to do more with less.

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Mattijs Overbosch: For us, Vertex was in the end the obvious choice. It was not only the most flexible product that we found on the market, but also the one where we had the most confidence in that, not only would it help us now but also in the future.

Fortive is continuously developing. We are growing a lot through mergers and acquisitions. So we needed a system that was capable of handling all those changes, not only now but also in the future.

One of the key trends that you see that tax authorities, tax departments have to face is the continuous trend of digitisation, and the requirement of providing more data faster to the tax authorities.

There’s really no way you can do that with the old ways and the old processes. So, whether you do it now or next year, there will come a time very quickly when you need to move to digitisation and software tools like Tax Performance Engine.

The biggest challenges: like everybody else, you need to do more with less. The real solution there is try to do less with human work and try to automate as much as possible, your standard processes. So you can rely on the output from your software, and focus on what’s considered to be the more higher value-add work, the analysis and the conclusions from those analyses.

I was in Brussels last year at Vertex Exchange; that was my first introduction to the wonderful world of Vertex. And this is the second one, where I’m actually contributing as a presenter on our project within Fortive, how we’re deploying Vertex and why it makes sense for us.

That indeed to me is the main reason to come here, to hear especially from my peers what they’re experiencing. The kinds of discussions they have internally in their organisations and how they dealt with that.

You obviously get a lot of push-back within the company if you ask for a budget for a software implementation; but not just that. When you implement software you also ask the finance groups usually to adapt their processes, adapt their way of working. You really need to have a convincing story to get them to do that, to make that step. So it’s always interesting to hear how other people within their organisations are dealing with that.