It’s time to bring tax into the real-time era

Across Europe and beyond, tax authorities are re-thinking how they collect and process information. We’re seeing a shift from traditional, file-based reporting to something much more dynamic: continuous tax compliance.

Governments in countries including Spain and Hungary are already using live transactional data to pre-fill VAT returns, flag anomalies in real time, and crack down on fraud. In the UK, HMRC’s Making Tax Digital (MTD) initiative is driving a similar push to bring more structure, transparency, and speed to tax reporting.

This presents a major challenge for businesses still operating with batch-based systems built for a different era. Staying compliant now means automating manual processes, improving data quality, and connecting tax, finance, and operations to run in real time.

Why traditional tax reporting is becoming a liability

Most organizations still manage tax compliance using a familiar and deeply embedded pattern: collect data, process it in large batches, reconcile ...