GuardianOnestream XF Success Story
Guardian Industries, a global company headquartered in Auburn Hills, Michigan, employs around 18,000 people and operates facilities throughout North America, Europe, South America, Africa, the Middle East and Asia. Guardian companies manufacture high-performance float, coated and fabricated glass products for architectural, residential, interior, transportation and technical glass applications, and high quality chrome-plated and painted plastic components for the automotive and commercial truck industries. Guardian’s vision is to create value for its customers and society through constant innovation using fewer resources. Guardian is a wholly owned subsidiary of Koch Industries, Inc. For more information, visit guardian.com.
Guardian Industries had implemented OneStream for financial consolidation, reporting, planning, forecasting, account reconciliations, return on capital and supplemental reporting. However, they were using Excel spreadsheets for tax data collection, provisioning and reporting.
Their annual tax provisioning process relied on the distribution of 75 Excel-based tax packages worldwide, with 12 tabs in each package with various calculations and reconciliations. The process was highly manual, with too much time spent collecting and consolidating data, reconciling to the GL, and correcting errors and not enough time reviewing and analyzing the data.
The extra hours spent managing the tax data collection process caused the Finance team to miss reporting deadlines to their parent company, despite the Tax Manager working around the clock to get her work done.
- Was relying on 75 Excel-based tax packages for data collection
- Process was highly manual, too much time spent on data manipulation
- Tax Manager was working long hours
- Company was missing reporting deadlines to parent company
OneStream’s tax experts began working with the Guardian tax team to configure their tax provision solution in OneStream. The initial phase started with replicating the initial tax package focusing on the retained earnings reconciliation, which identifies tax to book timing differences.
This required the configuration of a new tax account hierarchy, new legal entity structure for tax, and new forms for the provision calculations including many validations and data quality checks.
“Tying out the tax provision solution to consolidated GAAP GL earnings was a big accomplishment, and really important,” said Jessica McAlpine, Project Manager at Guardian Industries. “With the new system users can add attachments to support calculations, create a journal entry to book the tax provision and ensure the tax provision expense ties out to the GL.”
Guardian is leveraging the Guided Workflow within OneStream to organize required vs. optional forms that users need to complete. Once all the required forms are complete, the user must confirm and certify their workflows, which triggers regional Finance managers to perform their reviews. The system also includes tracking of tax submissions from 80 users across 100 entities.
- Financial Consolidation & Reporting
- Account Reconciliations
- Financial Data Quality Management
- Budgeting, Planning and Forecasting
- Sales and Operational Planning
- Tax Provision
Phase 1 of the tax provision project focused on addressing the tax provision for all US locations, and phase 2 is focusing on international locations and the monthly rollforward of data. Phase 2 includes implementing currency translation, so Guardian will be able to tie out each of their tax schedules to the GL in both local currency and US dollars.
“One of the key benefits of the new tax provision solution has been moving to a monthly provision reporting package for all locations, which was previously done only quarterly,” said McAlpine. “For the US, our close process has significantly improved, and our reporting is more accurate for all locations. Users are excited about the automation and time savings from the Excel approach. They are spending more time reviewing and analyzing tax data before submission deadlines. As we move into phase 2, our international users are looking forward to utilizing these benefits.”
According to McAlpine, “The new system will eliminate 75 spreadsheets and save an estimated 5 hours per month preparing the tax provision at each of the 75 locations. Also, the time spent to create the reports that are sent to their parent company is instantaneous as compared to the week spent in the past.”
“OneStream is so user-friendly and can be applied in many areas – reporting, planning, tax and others,” said McAlpine. “Once you understand the workflow, it’s easy to leverage it more broadly. The integration and addressing so many solutions in one platform is great – you just can’t beat it!”
- Aligned tax provision process to financial consolidation and reporting
- Elimination of 75 spreadsheets
- Saves 5 hours per month at each of 75 reporting locations
- Moved to monthly provision reporting process vs. quarterly
- Almost 1 week saved annually on tax reporting to parent company