"Thanks to Monarch, our clients' existing reports, particularly their accounts payable reports, can be easily transformed into live data for fast analysis, which dramatically expedites the sales tax audit and review process, as well as the recovery of overpay­ments."

 

DuCharme, McMillen & Associates, Inc. (DMA), headquartered in Indiana, is a leading firm of national scope dedicated primarily to state and local taxes (SALT). DMA provides property tax, sales/use tax, and state income tax consulting services, with over 230 employees and offices across the United States and Canada. The company uses Monarch to quickly access financial information from reports and other data sources for easy tax preparation and analysis.

David Fitch, Compliance Analyst for DMA, is a longtime user of Monarch for tax compliance and return preparation. "One of DMA's tax consulting tools is the use of our Sales Tax Automated Review Service (STARS), utilized in our sales and use tax division," says Fitch. "DMA will perform a 'reverse audit' of sales and use tax paid by our client, to ensure they have not overpaid their tax obligation."

"One of the biggest hurdles in performing these audits is getting the correct tax-related data in an audit-friendly format. The tax and accounting managers we typically work with are generally non-technical and have to wait for help from their IT department to access needed data. Monarch however, transforms existing accounting and other reports into actionable data without requiring programming assistance from our clients' IT personnel."

"Monarch has been of great benefit for our tax audit clients," Fitch adds. "Thanks to Monarch, our clients' existing reports, particularly their accounts payable reports, can be easily transformed into live data for fast analysis, which dramatically expedites the sales tax audit and review process, as well as the recovery of overpayments."

The power of Monarch is also now being put to very effective use in conjunction with DMA's Tax Compliance practice. "Our Compliance practice provides our clients with outsourced tax return preparation services," says Eric Buntin, director of the Compliance practice. "A typical DMA compliance client may have from 1,000 to 1,500 sales and use return filings each year. It is critical that access to sales and other data be quick and easy, and not require long-winded programming projects or error-prone re-keying of data. "

"Monarch makes it easy to access and manipulate a lot of data quickly from multiple data sources," Buntin says. "For example, a client may produce sales reports from their accounting or ERP system reflecting sales tax charged to their customers while another report may show the client's accrued use tax liability. Still another possible source of data is sales and use tax information maintained in an Excel spreadsheet."

"Monarch Pro enables easy transformation and analysis of the data from these and other data sources quickly and easily," Fitch adds. "Even better, Monarch then lets us export the sales and use tax data in the correct format for InSource, our automated tax preparation software."

"InSource then produces signature-ready tax returns. Monarch and InSource together constitute a great end-to-end software solution for the sales and use tax compliance professional."

"Tax and accounting managers seeking a simple, self-service solution to access and manipulate data within reports, spreadsheets, databases, and other sources should give Monarch a close look," says Buntin. "Monarch has proven itself to be a very valuable tool in helping DMA effectively fulfill our clients' sales and use tax return filing needs."

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