Sometimes we need to empty the whole tool bag.
Our solutions sometimes use a combination of our services and software. In this project we used APX SSRS reporting and workflow improvement and our Gondo software.
Challenge
Our client’s core challenge was to ease the tax filing burden on their clients that invested in exchange-traded limited partnerships (LP). For each LP a client owned during the tax year in any of their portfolios, they would receive a Schedule K-1 from the LP. To make it easier for the investor, our client would email a PDF package containing four pages:
- – a checklist of all the K-1s to expect
- – two pages of instructions on how to verify the K-1 data
- – a list of contacts if they needed help
This emphasis on service was great for their clients, but placed a huge burden on our client, especially as the number of clients approached four figures. It took three weeks to take the custom Replang reports, check them and carefully collate the other three pages into the correctly-named PDF. This sizable administrative burden was in major annual endeavor for the client service team. Additionally, generating reports that were consistent with the company’s broader branding initiatives, though not essential, was a goal that was hard to reach using Replang output.
Solution
First, we created an SSRS report that displayed just the client’s name and their LP-holdings checklist for the previous tax year. We then created a static set of the other three pages, each designed with our client’s branding in mind.
“A huge time saver. A three-week process now takes three-to-five days.”
The K-1 SSRS report was then run on the appropriate group, and the 900-plus-page PDF was split into individual PDFs using Adobe Acrobat and the files renamed using an old-school Windows “batch” file.
We now had 900+ single-page K-1 PDFs and one set of three PDFs for the balance of the report. Collating these was easy: that’s what Gondo does. We created a treatment in Gondo which mapped the pages in the appropriate order, then ran all the individual PDFs through the Gondo process. Voila!
Benefits
- – Reduces time needed from three weeks to three-to-five days.
- – Potential for errors reduced significantly
- – A client deliverable that looks impeccable