Vendor Spotlight: Bloomberg Tax & Accounting

For those with even the most tenuous and remote connection to the business world at all, Bloomberg is practically a household name for its wide variety of solutions, and accounting professionals are no exception. Bloomberg Tax & Accounting's products and services are used by thousands of professionals across the country for both operational needs and research. The company's roots date back to 1929 with the Bureau of National Affairs, which became Bloomberg BNA, and it has been producing tax software since 1984 with the launch of Income Tax Planner.

The venerable company has continued expanding, entering new spaces like income tax provision, and expanding its presence in areas like international tax. It has also been experimenting with AI, having recently launched an AI lab as well as a new large language model feature. 

Evan Croen, senior vice president of product at Bloomberg Tax & Accounting, caught up with Accounting Today, discussing recent accomplishments like the release of Bloomberg Tax Provision as well as some of his plans for the future, including more generative AI.

Arielle Lewis

How would you best describe what your company does?

Croen: Bloomberg Tax & Accounting provides practitioner-driven research and technology solutions that deliver timely, strategic insights to enable smarter decisions. From our unparalleled Tax Management Portfolios to technology designed to streamline the most complex planning and compliance scenarios, we deliver essential news and analysis, practical perspectives, and software that help tax and accounting professionals around the globe mitigate risk and maximize business results.

What is in your product line, and what is your flagship product?
 
Croen: Our flagship offering and what we are best known for is Bloomberg Tax Research. On the software side, our Bloomberg Tax Fixed Assets software, used by thousands of businesses, is our next biggest offering. Beyond our staple solutions, we have several new products in our lineup including Bloomberg Tax Provision and Bloomberg Tax Workpapers. Other products include Bloomberg Corporate Tax Analyzer and Bloomberg Income Tax Planner. 

What product of yours do you think should be better known among accountants? 

Croen: Accountants should know about Bloomberg Tax Provision. ASC 740 inaccuracy and ineffectiveness of controls in the process remain a leading cause of company financial restatements and material weaknesses. The tax provision is typically the most scrutinized process that the tax department undertakes. The CFO, CEO and audit committee all have an interest in understanding exactly what is driving the company's tax rate and the significant components of the tax provision. A fresh, modern approach to provision, Bloomberg Tax Provision is unique, much simpler to use, and more complete than other solutions. 

What was the last big initiative or project your company completed?

Croen: Most recently, we relaunched Bloomberg Tax Provision. In addition to new features, this was a total technical rebuild. While the original version was strong in its own right, we decided it was critical for us to rebuild the software to integrate with our existing software solutions. A refreshed look and feel, a more powerful technical framework that is easier to extend into additional provision-related calculations, and super fast implementation are the key hallmarks of our newly overhauled Bloomberg Tax Provision software. 

What is the most exciting new thing you're working on? 

Croen: While we are excited about all of our products in our suite, what we are really excited about is how we are connecting them. Rather than building solutions in silos, Bloomberg Tax & Accounting looks for ways to make the tax function more seamless, efficient, repeatable and integrated.  These guiding principles are reflected in each of our software products. As an example, Bloomberg Tax Workpapers, currently integrated with our tax provision solution, combines the power of automated data transformation with the flexibility of a spreadsheet. Early adopters have moved beyond Excel to improve the end-to-end tax provision workpaper process with integrated tax guidance, data prep and controls — all in a single solution.

What differentiates your company from others similar to it? What makes you different?

Croen: Unlike other tax and accounting solutions, we don't view compliance as the center of the universe. Our perspective is that tax calculations, including the work to create, maintain and develop controls around them, is an area that has been neglected by legacy providers. We have a more holistic view, in which solutions to core tax problems are not built in isolation from one another, and in which calculations are central. We infuse our world-renowned research into our software solutions so our customers have access to tax laws and rates at their moment of need. It is this transformation of tax laws into usable intelligence, coupled with our powerful calculation engines and robust planning tools that ultimately differentiates Bloomberg Tax & Accounting from the rest. 

What is the biggest challenge with selling to this market? Of being a company whose customers are primarily accountants? 

Croen: Our biggest challenge by far is resistance to change. Many accountants and tax departments feel that "if it was good enough for last year, it is good enough for this year." However, the need for accuracy and detail is only going to increase in the future. Departments are being challenged more and more on accuracy while maintaining speed, and run a real risk if they stick with the status quo (e.g., Excel spreadsheets). Further, we expect CFOs to demand more strategic value out of internal departments, meaning that they will need to automate low-value work through software and enable higher-value work.  

If your company has been experimenting with generative AI, how have you incorporated it into your business?

Croen: Bloomberg Tax & Accounting recently launched its first generative AI-driven feature to enhance the Bloomberg Tax Research experience. The new enhancement is a question and answer service, combining Bloomberg Tax Research with a large language model (LLM) to produce an AI-generated summary response. This contextualized response provides a short synopsis, which also identifies the source materials and links directly to the most relevant Bloomberg Tax Research content. The vision is to eventually add AI functionality throughout all of our tax and accounting software products to help our customers make better, data-driven decisions. 

One important point to highlight in regards to AI is that users need to understand that AI is driven by technology, not humans. As such, careful consideration must be made when using AI. To that end, use of AI on our platform will be clearly labeled, with clear communications related to privacy and usage.

Bloomberg Tax and Accounting at a glance:
Headquarters: Arlington, Virginia
Website: https://pro.bloombergtax.com/
Number of products: 6 

This is part of our regular Vendor Spotlight series, where we highlight technology vendors that are fueling the accounting profession's digital transformation.