Document Manager Software

Search / Retrieve Tax Files Across Corporate Entities and Tax Years

Imagine the task of managing documents for a large international company with hundreds of corporate entities - each of which may change parent companies or names several times over a 25 year history.

If the company is notified of an IRS tax audit you must quickly gather years of documentation for that company.  The only way to manage this task is through a Tax Document Management database.

The specific objectives of this document management database were to:

• Maintain the document location of each tax document down to the building/cabinet/drawer

• Manage the location of documents which may have been checked out by one of the dozens of tax accountants

• Identify countries, parent companies, old corporate names, previous project/audit involvement, and more

• Be able to fuzzy search by all main fields in the database including old corporate names or old parent companies, years, countries, projects and IRS regulations.

• Provide a simple user interface for clerical personnel in the Tax Accounting group

We choose our standard tabbed interface for the design of the database interface.  Below are the main screens and a discussion of the functions for the tax document manager database.

(Click on images to see full sized version)

Below is are standard welcome screen for this tax return document manager.  The key functions are listed on the tabs - tax File Management, tax File Search, Labels, and List Maintenance.

The tax file management screen allows the user to enter the details for each of the tax files.  These attributes include:

• Tax File Number

• File Name

• Brief Description

• Project Name

• File Date

• File Type

• Document Type

• Primary and Alternate Corporate Entities

• Countries or Regions

• Document Year

• Keywords

• Code Numbers

• Detailed Location Information

• Document Check Out Status

For the multi-select lists, a simple double-click will move the selection from on column to another.

Key to the tax file locator database is the search form show below.  The screen provide for a fuzzy search on the main attribute fields show at the top section of the form.  Additionally, multiple selection lists are available for corporate entity names, primary companies, and old names (all available in the 'available entities' list).

Below are the results of the tax file search function.  There exists a fail-safe feature in the search logic.  The fail-safe feature will include any documents for which a particular multi-select parameter has been defined but where none has been entered for a particular document - all documents should have a least one entry from the multi selection lists.

The list management section of the tax file document manager has a key component - the ability to identify old corporate entity names as names change of the years: