This webinar was presented by Kivanc Pakel and Varun Tejpal, Executives from Global Operations at the General Electric Company, who outlined the GE journey which led to the development of a platform to provide a simplified, compliant and tax optimised solution to the problems created by their complex intercompany transactions.
Kivanc and Varun began the webinar by explaining how, prior to 2014, GE had a great deal of cross-border billing with a multitude of service providers and different types of contracts and agreements; a lot of complicated activity requiring huge manual effort which led to millions of dollars of tax leakage, high transition costs and no available analytics. As a consequence, in 2014, GE developed their own in-house bespoke platform called OneBiller which enabled the centralisation of all agreements using an automated process. By providing accounting services this centralised way the challenge was to make sure that costs incurred were transferred appropriately in a statutory and tax compliant manner back to the countries where they were being incurred; back to the beneficiaries and with the right back up for audit purposes.
The OneBiller system has been a work in progress over the last 3-4 years and Kivanc and Varun explained how new functionality is constantly being added resulting in a 95% reduction in cross border transactions, one touch analytics enabled, 5000+ agreements not required, 80% reduction in invoices and millions of dollars of penalties saved. The platform is very scalable without causing stability issues and can be bolted on top of any ERP system with minimal implementation cost. Its success is a function of IT capabilities and an operating team with a lot of international tax experience.
Kivanc and Varun closed the webinar summing up the key benefits of the One Biller platform:
If you were not able to attend this webinar and you would like more information please contact Joy Lord - j.lord@iapa.net.
