With the deadline for filing tax returns looming, individuals and businesses are scrambling to get the proper forms filled out and ensure all their paperwork is in order. For telecom companies in particular this can present challenges as they struggle to populate sales and use forms and worksheets to properly calculate telecom taxes.

That’s when a company like BillSoft (News - Alert), Inc., which specializes in enabling business process optimization through a variety of tax calculation products and services, can come in handy. TMC’s (News - Alert) Peter Bernstein got a chance to catch up with BillSoft at the ITEXPO (News - Alert) Miami event to find out how the company helps automate taxes to improve customers’ operational efficiencies.

BillSoft’s products are designed to automate tax calculation and filing by automatically filling out transaction tax items and returns. The company also handles compliance filing, tax data reference, tax customization and configuration and management. Their EZTax offering can calculate hundreds of taxes for more than 70,000 tax jurisdictions in more than 85 countries, at a rate of 2.4 billion transactions per hour.

“From the tax calculation perspective, we’re in contact with over 10,000 jurisdictions on a daily basis, so we gather a large amount of data and throw it in databases and keep those maintained,” said Tim Lopatofsky (News - Alert) CEO of BillSoft. “Before we automated this process it would take one analyst about a month to do 350 returns, and now our software can do over 3,000 returns per analyst in a month.”

And that automation saves customers time and money, which is always a priority, particularly during tax season. The software may be accessed via cloud services, batch processes or APIs. BillSoft also offers the EZGeo geospatial product that can take an individual or company address, convert it to latitude and longitude values and compare those values with geopolitical maps to determine the appropriate taxing district or authority.

BillSoft has been on a strong growth trajectory, reporting increased cloud services revenues of 22 percent for 2013. The company’s revenues from licensed products grew 16 percent, with compliance filing services revenues reaching 36 percent. BillSoft’s overall revenue growth for the year was 27 percent.