Use Case

Regulatory & Compliance Reporting (e.g., VAT, Tax, IFRS)

Automate the compilation of regulatory filings – from VAT returns to IFRS disclosures – with confidence and accuracy.

Easy setup, no data storage required
Free forever for core features
Simple expansion with additional credits

Overview

Automate the compilation of regulatory filings – from VAT returns to IFRS disclosures – with confidence and accuracy.

 Finance teams report spending 30-40% of their time on regulatory compliance, with manual errors costing companies an average of $14.8 million annually in penalties and remediation. This use case targets the myriad of regulatory reports finance departments must produce – reports that can make or break your compliance record and consume countless hours of skilled resources. Examples include VAT/GST returns, income tax provision calculations, statutory reports for local authorities, industry-specific filings (like Solvency II for insurers or Basel reports for banks), and IFRS/GAAP disclosure tables. With Keboola, data from core systems is aggregated and transformed into the required formats for these filings, reducing manual effort by up to 80% while dramatically improving accuracy. It ensures consistency between management accounts and regulatory reports, eliminating the dangerous "two versions of truth" problem where separate silos or one-off calculations in Excel drift from the actual books. The tone is that of a highly diligent compliance officer who has discovered that modern data tools can transform compliance from a risky manual chore into a streamlined, defensible process – letting your team focus on strategic tax planning and risk management rather than spreadsheet gymnastics.

Your Challenges

Time-Consuming Manual Prep

Regulatory reports often involve taking data from the accounting system and rearranging or calculating new figures per regulatory definitions. For example, preparing a VAT return might mean exporting all AR and AP transactions for a period and then filtering by tax codes, manually checking exceptions, and hoping no formula got accidentally deleted. Many companies use spreadsheets for this, which is laborious and risks formula errors that can cost millions in penalties or overpayments.

Complex Compliance Requirements

Rules can be intricate and vary by jurisdiction – certain transactions might be zero-rated for VAT in one country but standard-rated in another, certain leases require specific footnote detail under IFRS 16, cryptocurrency transactions have evolving tax treatment. If done manually, there's a significant risk of misunderstanding or misapplying rules, especially when they change (which happens frequently).

Inconsistency and Duplicate Work

Often the data used for regulatory reporting is prepared separately from regular financial reporting, creating a dangerous parallel universe of numbers. This can lead to inconsistencies (numbers not tying exactly due to different processing methodologies) and definitely duplicate effort with endless reconciliation exercises. For example, a bank might have one team preparing Basel risk-weighted asset reports and another doing financial statements, each pulling similar data but in different ways with slightly different assumptions.

High Penalties for Errors

Unlike internal reports where you can correct and move on, regulatory filings can carry severe penalties or legal consequences if wrong. Errors in a VAT return could mean fines ranging from thousands to millions depending on jurisdiction and materiality. Errors in statutory accounts could mean qualified audits, regulatory investigations, or in extreme cases, personal liability for finance leaders. The stress on finance teams is immense to get everything perfect under tight deadlines

Our Solution & Value

Rules-Driven Automation

Keboola allows encoding the logic of regulatory calculations so they run automatically with audit-trail precision. For instance, all transactions can be tagged by tax category and the VAT payable/refundable is calculated with the correct rates, then a VAT return format can be generated (with sales, purchases, inputs, outputs, etc.) in minutes instead of days. If rules change (say a tax rate increases from 20% to 21%), update the rate in one centralized location and all downstream calculations update automatically – no need to hunt through dozens of linked spreadsheets hoping you found every hardcoded reference.

Single Data Source for Multiple Uses:

Because Keboola centralizes data, the figures used in regulatory reports are directly reconcilable to those in financial books or internal reports – eliminating the dreaded "which number is right?" conversations. For example, the total revenue number in the VAT return can be directly tied to the GL revenue accounts for the period – if they don't match, that's a clear flag caught immediately, not discovered during an audit six months later. The platform can generate automatic reconciliation reports to ensure every regulatory figure has a transparent basis in the accounting data or subledger data, dramatically improving accuracy and auditability.

Pre-built Templates & Automated Formats

Keboola can produce output in specific formats required by regulators – be it a PDF/XBRL for statutory accounts, an XML for electronic regulatory submission, CSV files for local tax authorities, or even direct API submission to government systems where available. By automating formatting, finance teams don't have to fiddle with form layouts or wrestle with Excel templates from regulators that seem designed to break at the worst possible moment. For instance, many countries have standard VAT return forms; Keboola can output the values ready to plug in or even fill a connected template automatically.

Audit Trail & Documented Compliance

Every number in the regulatory report can have a drill-down or documentation explaining it, stored permanently in Keboola. This is invaluable when auditors or regulators query something: instead of chasing down who did what in which version of which spreadsheet (assuming they're still with the company), you have an explanation ready instantly – "This figure includes X and Y per regulation ABC; calculated as per formula in data pipeline step Z, see source transactions list here." Keboola keeps complete history too, so prior period filings are archived in the system with full lineage.

Example Outputs

Tax Accountant

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A generated VAT/GST return summary: total taxable sales, taxable purchases, tax collected, tax credits, net payable/refund – with a detailed annex listing any non-standard rated items (if needed for compliance). Also a reconciliation report showing that, say, total sales per VAT return equals total revenue per GL with any reconciling items (like revenue not subject to VAT or reverse charge items) clearly listed and explained. They might also get automated alerts if any transaction had an unusual tax code or missing code so they can investigate and fix it before filing – catching errors proactively rather than reactively. For multinational groups, this could include VAT returns for 10+ jurisdictions, all generated from the same source data but applying local rules, ready for review in a fraction of the time previously required.

Financial Accountant/Controller:

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Automated statutory financial statements: an income statement, balance sheet, cash flow statement in the required format (which might differ significantly from internal management format) and including comparative periods, reclassifications, and all required disclosures. Plus all the note schedules populated automatically – fixed assets rollforward, debt maturity schedule, related party transactions, segment reporting, revenue disaggregation under IFRS 15, lease liability schedules under IFRS 16, etc. They could review these in a draft package and just add narrative commentary or minor tweaks if needed, rather than compiling from scratch or copying last year's and manually updating every number. Another critical output could be the corporation tax provision calculation – a detailed sheet showing book profit, adjustments (temporary differences like depreciation vs. tax allowances, permanent differences like non-deductible expenses) and taxable income, then tax expense broken down by current and deferred. If this is data-driven with clearly defined rules for each adjustment, it can generate a defensible provision that they review and then book, with supporting detail ready for auditors on day one.

Regulatory Reporting Specialist

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If in a specialized industry, something like the Basel III capital adequacy report for a bank or Solvency II Own Risk and Solvency Assessment (ORSA) for an insurer: basically complex tables of required ratios (capital adequacy, liquidity coverage, risk-weighted assets by category, available capital tiers, etc.) along with underlying data breakdowns that can run to hundreds of pages. Keboola can produce those ratios by aggregating data from multiple systems (e.g., loan book for credit risk, trading systems for market risk, actuarial systems for insurance risk) and applying regulatory calculation methodologies. The specialist gets a final report that they might currently be compiling via multiple systems, manual exports, and dozens of linked spreadsheets prone to breaking. With automation, they validate the outputs, add management commentary, and submit – transforming a 3-week process into a 3-day process. For regulator visits or examinations, they also have the complete data lineage and calculation methodology documentation for each figure at their fingertips, making these interactions far less stressful.

Get in touch with our team.

FAQs

It's typically far easier and faster than updating manual processes across your team. If a regulation change is minor (like a form line added, a threshold changed from €10K to €15K, or a new disclosure paragraph required), it might be as simple as adding a new data field or changing a parameter in the pipeline – often taking hours, not weeks. If it's a major change (like a new accounting standard requiring entirely new calculations such as IFRS 17 for insurance contracts), you treat it as a mini-project: design the new logic in Keboola, test it thoroughly on historical data to validate results, and deploy. Since Keboola is quite user-friendly for data engineering (you don't need to be a programmer), these changes are generally much quicker than waiting for an ERP vendor to provide a patch (which can take months or never arrive) or writing completely new macros and formulas in Excel that no one else understands. Also, with centralized logic, you ensure everyone across your entire organization uses the updated rule from day one of effectivity – there's no dangerous fragmentation of some departments or subsidiaries applying old methods while others use new ones. In many cases, you can prepare the new calculation logic and keep the old running in parallel to report the effects of changes (extremely useful during transition periods for standards like IFRS 16 or IFRS 9). And if you foresee frequent changes (like tax law updates annually or quarterly), you can design the solution to be easily parameterized with rates and thresholds in configuration tables that business users can update without touching code. So, while any regulatory change requires work, having it managed in Keboola means one coordinated update with full testing versus many manual updates scattered across spreadsheets, teams, and entities with inconsistent implementation and high error risk.

Keboola is not a canned regulatory reporting tool with fixed templates; it's a flexible data platform. That means it's fully capable of handling very specific requirements – because you define exactly what it should do based on your regulations and business rules. We often implement using known formulas and guidelines from regulators, accounting standards, or industry best practices, but customized to your exact needs. For highly specific needs (like proprietary risk models or jurisdiction-specific calculations), we can integrate external libraries, custom code, or even AI/ML models into the pipeline. Essentially, if you can define the rules and identify the data, Keboola can execute it reliably at scale. And it can do so repeatedly without error or fatigue, unlike manual processes. Many large multinational firms and regulated financial institutions have used Keboola and similar data platforms for complex compliance successfully (like generating XBRL financial statements for multiple jurisdictions, calculating Basel III risk-weighted assets across complex banking books, or producing Solvency II quantitative reporting templates with thousands of data points). The key is the design phase – we collaborate closely with your compliance experts and auditors to encode exactly what's needed and validate outputs thoroughly. The benefit is that once it's set up and tested, the repeatability, auditability, and accuracy are exceptional – far exceeding what manual processes can deliver. So yes, you can trust it precisely because you will have built and tested it to your specific requirements, rather than relying on a one-size-fits-all product that inevitably doesn't fit your unique situation well.

It should significantly reduce overall workload volume, especially grunt work, while shifting the nature of work to higher-value activities. Initially, the compliance/finance team will be actively involved in setting up the automation – providing the requirements, defining business rules, testing outputs against known good results – which is a shift from doing manual processing to supervising and validating an automated process. But once in place and proven, instead of preparing reports from scratch each period, your team will be reviewing system-generated reports for reasonableness and exceptions. That typically takes 70-80% less time, and the nature of the work shifts from clerical data gathering to analytical review (they can focus on whether the numbers make business sense and investigating anomalies, rather than compiling the numbers cell by cell). For example, a tax analyst might currently spend a full week or more preparing a VAT return manually; with automation, they spend half a day validating it, and the rest of that time can be reallocated to strategic tax planning, identifying optimization opportunities, or handling more complex advisory work. So, workload volume goes down substantially for routine tasks, and the freed capacity can be reallocated to activities that actually add value. Also, since the platform can run transformations and reports off-hours (overnight or on weekends), some processes might literally happen automatically with no human in the loop until review time, which is a direct capacity win. In summary, it reduces repetitive workload dramatically and changes the role of the compliance team to more oversight, quality assurance, and strategic analysis, which is usually a very welcome change for skilled professionals. Finance teams report less overtime during filing periods, higher job satisfaction (less tedious work), more time to ensure quality and work on continuous improvements, and better work-life balance when they're not staying until midnight before a filing deadline fixing spreadsheet errors.