Tax software.

Planitax, a supplier of automated, hosted tax solutions, has brought out its Data Collector module, the latest addition to its Corporate Tax Horizons[TM] suite.

Data Collector queries a company's enterprise resource planning (ERP) system to gather necessary tax-related information, and the Web-based nature of the applications allows it to stay current, says Seda Taysi, Planitax's founder and chief strategy officer. Currently, most of this information-gathering is done through manual conversion of information to spreadsheets by individual tax units, notes Planitax president and CEO Greg Prow.

Data Collector joins the Corporate Tax Horizon's other modules: Tax Operations, File Manager, Global Entity Manager, Audit Manager and R & D Tax Credit Manager. The Emeryville, Calif.-based Planitax combines them in a hosted solution, outside a corporate firewall, that allows ready access by decentralized tax departments and offers "uniform click methodology" on top of easily modified interfaces, says Prow.

He says that company experiences with Sarbanes-Oxley Section 404, with its focus on internal controls, have highlighted the need for tax areas to be unified with other financial controls; historically, most financial software solutions "have stopped just short of the tax department." Taysi adds that most tax software is designed to fill out specific forms--such as sales tax, state and federal taxes and payroll taxes--and not to collect information that can be used analytically.

Privately held Planitax, founded in 1999, claims some 30 corporate customers with average revenues of $2 billion to $5 billion. Prow says its target customer has international operations and at least three to four individuals in an internal tax department.

Web: www.planitax.com

Deloitte & Touche Tax Technologies LLC (DTTT) has launched CORP-TAX[R] ETS Visual Org, a new product designed to help tax professionals easily visualize an enterprise's current or proposed tax situation. ETS Visual Org allows tax departments to generate graphical organization charts that depict ownership relationships between entities and display various entity attributes.

"The ability for tax professionals to visualize the ownership structure and entity attribute information in a single graphical report is vital to the tax planning and compliance process," said DTTT CEO and Partner-in-Charge Ray Lombardi in an announcement. "ETS Visual Org greatly enhances the tax planning and analytical capabilities of our systems, especially for companies with global tax compliance and planning responsibilities."

DTTT says the ETS Visual Org can help companies save time and increase productivity by automating the time-consuming and labor-intensive method of having tax professionals create organization charts manually. This process can involve reviewing hundreds and sometimes thousands of entities.

The systems interface provides tax departments with the ability to leverage ownership and other entity attribute information from CORPTAX ETS directly into the ETS Visual Org system. Tax departments can easily select the tax year, ownership date, case and enterprise for which the CORPTAX ETS data should be retrieved. Since ETS Visual Org is integrated with CORPTAX ETS, users can leverage data gathered for tax compliance and other purposes in further planning and analysis without having to re-key data.

ETS Visual Org also allows tax professionals to choose from a multitude of automatic report layout options, including top-to-bottom, left-to-right, straight connectors, curved and right-angle connectors, and customize the shapes displayed for each entity type. The system can also create a variety of reports showing parents and/or subsidiaries of a selected entity.

Web: www.deloitte.com/dtt