I know tax, but do I know HOW to do tax?

For months I meant to hand a few of my own reviews over to a colleague. It is a review I do of some countries, it lives entirely in my head, and every time I thought about writing it up I found something more interesting to do. In the end I switched on a process capture tool, did the review as normal, and checked what it produced. I came out with a document I could give her, and she could ask me a few targeted questions instead of sitting through the meeting we never managed to schedule. I am keeping the tool generic on purpose, because I am not here to advertise tools. Pick whichever one your company allows, the argument does not depend on the brand. If someone wants to pay me for product placement, colm@askcolm.com , I can always edit the article. The argument is that writing a process down is a pain in the ass, and a tool can now do the first draft while you do the work. The trick I have found is to make it small and do not try to document a whole end to end process in one sitting. Turn the tool on when you start downloading your data, and let it follow you through that one step. You still check it and you still own it, but you are editing, which is quicker than starting from a blank page. I care about this because nothing can be automated until it is written down. If the steps, the sources and the controls only exist in one person’s head, there is nothing to hand to a tool and nothing for a new colleague to learn from. Once they are on paper, the repetitive parts can run in the background. The team then spends less time finding reports and more time on exceptions, projects and research. I would like compliance to get to the point where a team lead looks at anomalies once a month and the rest of the time goes on work that moves things forward. That does not change the size of the team. It changes what the team does. I wanted to test this with my group, so I ran a small exercise. People paired up and the first person had 120 seconds to explain a process they own, something repetitive. The other could not ask a single question they could only write or draw. Then we swapped. I told the room beforehand that it might prove my point or it might leave me with egg on my face. It proved the point, though not the one I expected. Nobody said they did not understand the tax nor nobody said they could not do the reconciliation that was described to them. What people said was that they did not know which entity it was, where the data came from, which report to run or what format it needed to be in. That is a lot of expertise and not much detail. Two minutes is enough to explain the logic but It is not enough to explain every system and file, and these tools are now showing us you do not need to write it down. I think eighty percent is a reasonable target for expertise in a pinch, if someone is on holiday, or twists an ankle on a Sunday walk (or a Saturday boogie, wink!), a colleague who has never worked on that country should be able to cover it for a month with a good document and a clear idea of where the data lives. Tools and exercises like these showed that while we all know a lot about tax, not many of us know how to do the work.