Armanino is never satisfied with the status quo. The accounting and consulting firm is constantly innovating its financial services to find new ways to advance its clients’ businesses. They thrive in the technology realm — both by providing services for technology companies and by using technology to grow their business. Their 2025 strategic plan highlights automation as a key tool for increasing efficiency and streamlining business processes. Behind the scenes and helping make this goal a reality is a rockstar automation team cleverly innovating with SS&C | Blue Prism® Cloud.

Challenge

Each year, Armanino assists clients with their corporate tax filings and prepares tax-related documentation for each organization. Organizations must issue a 1099 tax form to people not employed by the company but who have received compensation. Generating accurate information for these forms is time-consuming but critical to the individual and the organization. Armanino wanted to ease their clients’ burdens, but the web form they developed to handle 1099 form requests required manual data entry. Thousands of spreadsheets arriving at the end of the tax year had to be processed in just one month. Armanino would have to hire and train a large seasonal workforce to meet demands. Additionally, the spreadsheets were often inconsistent, containing errors and duplicated data. To ensure a positive client experience, Armanino needed a way to process the 1099 data quickly and accurately.

Solution

Armanino’s automation team leaned into their tax professional’s enthusiasm around automation and dispatched their SS&C Blue Prism digital workers to rapidly process the 1099s. Now, Armanino sends clients’ spreadsheets through Alteryx, a data analytics platform, to validate the data and remove or fix inconsistencies before passing clean, structured data to their digital workers. The digital workers quickly read the data, input the individual 1099 data into the web form, create a 1099 form and cover letter, file the form with the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), and send a copy of the filing to the client. This improves the business process by increasing accuracy and efficiency, saving more time for their clients.

Digital workers are increasing accuracy and efficiency for their clients in other areas of the tax department, too. When clients request a tax filing extension, they must provide documentation and gain government approval. Digital workers review each request, and if it’s complete, send it to the IRS and state tax authorities. When the tax authority approves or denies the request, digital workers communicate the news and next steps to clients.

Digital workers are helping the finance team save nearly 2,000 hours a year by taking on a bank reconciliation process. Each month, they assess relevant bank accounts, pull reports and account activity statements from multiple systems, perform the reconciliation, and assemble the final documentation for easy review by staff.

The team is furiously working through their pipeline of automation candidates to support new areas of the business. They plan to grow their technology prowess by exploring more optical character recognition (OCR) and artificial intelligence (AI) tools.