Everything the platform does, and what each part is for.
23 capabilities across six areas — from cross-border calculation to the review controls that decide when a person should look. Written for the people who will use it rather than the people who built it.
One engine, 80+ countries
Most firms handle a second country by finding someone who knows it. That works until the third country, or until the person who knew it is on holiday in April. The knowledge sits with people, not with the practice, and it does not scale past the people who hold it.
Who this is for: Firms with clients in more than one country, and anyone advising people who moved mid-year.
Federal, state and regional rules, mapped together
Every layer of tax that applies to a client, in the right order, for the country they are actually in.
Tax is rarely one rule. A client in New York pays federal and state. A client in Zurich pays federal, cantonal and communal. A client in Germany has a solidarity surcharge sitting on top of income tax. Miss a layer and the return is wrong by an amount nobody notices until a notice arrives.
What you get: You see every layer that applies, and which one produced which part of the bill.
Cross-border tax calculator
Withholding, expatriate positions and transfer pricing, worked through instead of estimated.
A contractor invoicing from one country to another, an employee on secondment for eight months, a group charging management fees between subsidiaries. These are the questions that take a senior an afternoon and a phone call, and they come up constantly.
What you get: The afternoon becomes a few minutes, with the working shown.
Double-taxation treaty checker
Whether a treaty is in force between two countries, and what it actually changes.
Treaties are signed, ratified years later, amended, and occasionally suspended. Advising on one that has not entered into force yet, or quoting a rate a protocol replaced, is the kind of mistake that is invisible until it is expensive.
What you get: You check the position in front of the client instead of promising to come back to them.
Local legal terms in the local language
Read a provision in the language it was written in, with the working in yours.
A German provision means something specific in German. Translating it loses the edges, and arguing a position on a translation of a translation is how firms end up defending something the statute never said.
What you get: Your team reads the source as published and still works in the language they think in.
When the law changes, you find out
Rates change, thresholds move, reliefs are withdrawn. Firms find out from a newsletter, a client, or a rejected filing. The gap between a rule changing and a practice acting on it is where most quiet errors live.
Who this is for: Compliance leads, and any partner who signs off work they did not personally do.
Official sources watched, not summaries of them
Government gazettes, revenue authority publications and legislative registers across 80+ countries.
Secondary commentary is fast and sometimes wrong. The platform reads what the authority itself published, so what you act on is the source rather than somebody's reading of it.
What you get: You are working from the same document the inspector will open.
Changed wording, and what it touches
A change in a provision is traced to every calculation and return it affects.
Knowing a rule changed is half the job. The half that takes a week is working out which clients, which computations and which filed positions it reaches.
What you get: The affected work is listed for you instead of being something you go looking for.
Old returns re-run against new rules
Sample returns are recomputed after every change, to catch a figure that quietly moved.
The dangerous update is not the one that breaks something loudly. It is the one that shifts a threshold by a few hundred and leaves every number looking plausible.
What you get: A change that moves a figure it should not have is caught before it reaches a client.
A monthly record of what changed
Plain notes on what moved, when, and which clients it touched.
When a client asks why this year's number differs, or a regulator asks how you keep current, you need a record. Most firms reconstruct one from memory and email.
What you get: You hand over a dated log instead of an explanation.
Documents in, clean books out
The first week of an engagement is spent turning a client's shoebox into something you can work from. It is the least skilled work in the practice and it is done by people you pay for judgement.
Who this is for: Bookkeeping teams, and firms whose juniors spend January keying in documents.
Local forms recognised on sight
W-2, 1099, T4, P60 and the equivalents in the other countries you work in.
A payroll form from one country looks nothing like another. Somebody has to know that the box in the corner of a T4 is not the box in the corner of a P60, and that somebody is usually your most expensive person or your least experienced one.
What you get: The document arrives already understood, with the fields where you expect them.
Bank feeds checked against local rules
Transactions reconciled against what is actually deductible where the client is.
A client lunch is deductible at one rate in France, another in Germany, and not at all somewhere else. Applying one country's instinct to another country's ledger is a common and completely invisible error.
What you get: The ledger is categorised against the rules that govern it, not the ones you know best.
Missing receipts and duplicates found
Mismatched invoices, absent documentation and double-entered items surfaced early.
These are found in the final review, when there is no time, or by an inspector, when there is no defence. Both are worse than finding them in week one.
What you get: You chase the client for documents in November, not the night before filing.
Asset write-offs across countries
Depreciation on each country's own schedule, kept running year to year.
Every jurisdiction has its own view of how fast a van wears out. Firms keep this in spreadsheets, and the spreadsheets are maintained by whoever built them.
What you get: Schedules are held in the system with the assets, not in a file on someone's desktop.
Returns that add up
A return is only as defensible as the arithmetic behind it, and most software will not show you the arithmetic. You get a figure in a box and a note saying the computation is proprietary.
Who this is for: Anyone who signs a return, and anyone who has had to explain one two years later.
Draft returns filled from the ledger
Official return forms populated from the books you already reconciled.
Re-keying a reconciled ledger into a return form introduces errors that have nothing to do with tax. It is transcription, and transcription is where fingers slip.
What you get: The draft starts populated, and your review is of the position rather than the typing.
Every figure opens up
Click any number on a return and see the calculation that produced it, step by step.
When a client or an inspector asks where a number came from, 'the software worked it out' is not an answer. You need the inputs, the rule applied and the order it was applied in.
What you get: You can defend any line on the form without going back to first principles.
Filed directly with the authority
Completed packages submitted to the local government portal.
Exporting a file, opening a portal, logging in and uploading is ten minutes per return that buys nothing, and it is where a return gets filed to the wrong year.
What you get: Submission is part of the work rather than a separate chore after it.
Better positions found before filing
Alternative filing statuses and treatments compared, with what each one would mean.
The optimal position often depends on a choice nobody revisits, like how a couple files or how a loss is carried. Testing the alternatives by hand takes longer than anyone has.
What you get: You show a client the options and the difference, rather than the first valid answer.
Built for how a firm actually works
Firms do not lose money on the tax. They lose it on review cycles, on work that has to be redone because nobody recorded why it was done that way, and on partners re-deriving a junior's reasoning from scratch.
Who this is for: Partners, reviewers, and anyone responsible for work they did not do themselves.
Position memos with the sections cited
A structured argument that points at the specific provisions it relies on.
A memo without pinpoint citations cannot be checked without redoing the research, which is exactly what the memo was meant to prevent.
What you get: A reviewer follows the argument to the source instead of rebuilding it.
Client files with edits, comments and approvals
Who changed what, who queried it, and who signed it off — across every client entity.
Group structures make this hard. The same person is a director here, a shareholder there, and out of scope somewhere else, and the file has to reflect that without three copies of it.
What you get: One file per client group, with the review history attached to the work.
A traceable chain behind every classification
Each decision the platform makes is recorded with what it was based on.
An inspector's first question is how a treatment was arrived at. A firm that can answer in minutes has a very different enquiry from one that starts pulling files.
What you get: The enquiry is a retrieval exercise, not an investigation of your own records.
What a decision costs before it is made
Model a sale, a move, a restructure or a new hire against current and expected rules.
Clients ask what-if questions constantly and most go unanswered properly, because answering properly means rebuilding the computation with different inputs.
What you get: Advisory work you can actually bill, rather than a guess over the phone.
You always know how far to trust it
The risk with any assistant is not that it is wrong. It is that it is wrong in the same confident tone it uses when it is right, and nobody can tell the two apart until it matters.
Who this is for: Everyone who has to sign something, and every firm carrying the professional risk.
Ask any figure where it came from
Click a number and get the inputs, the rule and the source behind it.
Explanation after the fact is guesswork. Explanation recorded at the moment the figure was produced is evidence.
What you get: A junior can learn from the file, and a partner can check it without redoing it.
How sure it is, said plainly
Extracted fields and answers carry a confidence level you can act on.
A blurred scan and a clean PDF should not produce equally confident results, and a question about a well-covered rule is not the same as one at the edge of what is known.
What you get: Attention goes where it is needed instead of being spread evenly over everything.
It stops and asks rather than guessing
Low-confidence and high-risk items are routed to a named person for review.
Software that always produces an answer will produce one when it should not. The valuable behaviour is knowing the difference and handing over.
What you get: Your people spend their judgement on the cases that need judgement.
Six things that change in a practice.
Feature lists do not tell a partner much. These are the differences a firm would notice in a season.
Busy season stops being a headcount problem
The work that fills January is document handling, reconciliation and transcription. Taking that off your team does not replace anyone; it means the people you already have spend the season on review and advice instead of data entry.
Review gets faster because the working is already there
Most review time is spent reconstructing what a preparer did. When every figure carries its inputs, its rule and its source, a reviewer checks the position rather than rebuilding the file.
Your exposure is visible instead of assumed
Low-confidence items are flagged, not buried. You know which returns leaned on a judgement call and which were routine, before you sign rather than after an enquiry.
You can take on work you used to refer away
A client with income in a second country is currently either a referral or a research project. With the rules for 80+ countries in the same place, it is a job you can quote for.
Enquiries stop being a fire drill
Every classification and figure keeps a record of what it was based on. When a question arrives about a return filed two years ago, the answer is in the file rather than in someone's memory.
Everyone works to the same standard
The difference between your strongest preparer and your newest one is mostly knowing what to check. Building that into the work makes the floor higher without slowing the ceiling down.
Find out whether your jurisdictions are covered.
Coverage decides whether anything else on this site is worth your time, and it is published per country including the gaps. Ten minutes there can save you a call.
TaxOrch provides decision support, not professional tax advice. Exact results apply only within declared coverage. TaxOrch does not file returns or execute payments. Review all outputs before filing.