Most companies have multiple year contacts with their vendors – with vague language, buried in highly complex, long-term contracts – and deep-rooted escalation clauses that trigger unanticipated expenditures over the life of a contract.
So, what happens when a new discount needs to be applied AFTER a contract is signed?
If the discount benefits the customer and reduces revenue for the vendor – the discount may never get activated in invoicing – or the vendor rep may forget to activate it, as their commission income would decrease.
Modifications to vendor contracts that are un-activated or unpublished are only one example, and a scintilla into the myriad of savings opportunities found in overhead that all companies have – Telecom, Utilities, Accounts Payable, Insurance and Benefits, Services and Supplies, Treasury, Real Estate, and Freight.
Secondly, the same magnitude of opportunity applies for tax credit incentives at the local, state and federal levels for all locations where a company does business.
Many tax credits go unclaimed, as tax departments are too busy with compliance and have limited resources and time to track tax legislation and credits – not published in a database – or in Section 38 of the almost 100,000 pages of IRS Code.
Even when a company tries to keep up, the complexity is more than a challenge – in that state and local tax credits don’t always last forever, federal tax credits sometimes sunset after several years or may be retroactive – and, if a tax credit is claimed and it is not usable in the current year, it can often carry forward 10-20 years.
In the United States, there are hundreds of boutiques, large consultancies and accountancies, including the Big 4 firms, that offer analytic services for cost recovery and tax credit incentives – under “billable hours” arrangements – researching and analyzing how a company’s operations map to active tax credit incentives at the local, state and federal levels – and how vendor contractual promises and changes map to vendor updates that should have been activated after a contract was signed.
However, under billable hours agreements, a company pays for an unknown outcome, whether or not there is an ROI – which is why cost recovery and tax credit offerings are usually narrow and industry-focused – as CEO’s and CFO’s find it too risky to have a third party execute enterprise-wide assessments that take too long, are too expensive, and may have uncertain results.
But, many companies are dramatically increasing their cost and tax credit cost efficiencies with analytics that can be executed within 30 days – for untapped overhead and unclaimed tax credits – across an entire company – and with a contingency contract in which the company only pays for services after their savings are realized to the bottom line.
The is possible because in 1999, Big 4 firm professionals left to form a startup known as DCI and developed a proprietary solution known as the DCI Cost Efficiency Dashboard™ – expediting the quality and speed of analytics.
Today, after 18 years of eliminating surprise expenditures and adding hidden tax credit dollars, the highly successful DCI continues to deliver a minimum savings of $1,000+ per employee per year (for example, if a company has 100 full-time employees, they save at least $100,000 annually to the bottom line).
Even with such amazing achievements, some execs have reservations about hiring DCI – as they believe “everything is covered” with the astronomical hourly rates they pay their Big 4, accounting, or management consulting firm – or assume that their employees already know the best practices that percolate outside the four walls of their company and across all industries.
Either way, cost recovery and tax credits incentives are highly specialized disciplines and are not core competencies for most companies.
For more on DCI’s extraordinary services, call 800-239-0867 to schedule a 30-minute Webinar or Conference Call – or go to UnclaimedTaxCredits.com.
DCI was founded in 1999 by Big 4 firm professionals who left and pioneered the DCI Cost Efficiency Dashboard™ – which maximizes the bottom line for companies across all industries – mining a minimum of $1,000 per employee in savings within 30 days – contributing to the ROI for overhead that all companies have – and unclaimed tax credit incentives for all the locations where a company does business.
