Menu
Energy
Espoo
What is crucial for a consistent transfer pricing process in a multinational enterprise? According to Dominik Bielecki, Manager, Data Sourcing and Development, it’s all about centralization and control.
“The biggest challenge for our tax team was the issue of transactional data and the need for oversight across various legal entities and jurisdictions,” Dominik says.
That’s why Fortum's Tax Team turned to the Aibidia platform to enable healthy global business. The platform automates transfer pricing processes, centralizes data, and transforms it into meaningful insights, helping shape and harmonize Fortum’s transfer pricing processes across different jurisdictions and entities.
Fortum is the largest electricity retailer in the Nordic region, with more than 2 million retail customers. To understand how Fortum’s Tax Team uses Aibidia to automate transfer pricing processes, we chatted with their global tax team to learn about the value Aibidia brings to their company.
"Before Aibidia, our process was manual, resulting in low data quality. With Aibidia in place, we’ve saved time and improved transparency among stakeholders and entities."
“Having all the information we need to prepare local files, including attachments, in one place makes it easier to manage the creation and saves time.”
Decentralization was an issue with “each country having its own set of methods of creating local files,” says Dominik.
This approach resulted in various inefficient processes throughout the company. It required individual reviews for all of the country’s internal transactions by requesting data from different individuals and departments, resulting in hundreds of emails and even more Excel spreadsheets.
It’s not surprising that the global tax team struggled to maintain control. Dominik emphasized issues with transactional data and the need for oversight.
Data quality was also another challenge. It quickly became a pain point for stakeholders, including business controllers, who are responsible for overseeing the financial reporting and securing compliance within the company according to group policies.
Managing multiple legal entities consisting of several operational business units made the process of local file preparation manual, which lead to inefficiencies and forced Controllers to spend considerable time, which could have been used for other priority financial tasks.
The good news in all of this? These challenges served as a catalyst for a single platform that would not only centralize data but also help Fortum save costs, time, and improve company-wide transparency.
“Aibidia is the only company with a serious and sophisticated approach to transactional data. It focuses on efficiently transforming the data and making it useful to us. Plus, the interconnectivity between transactional data and the creation of local files is a core part of Aibidia,” says Dominik.
What’s even better is that, with the help of transfer pricing policy automation in Aibidia, the Fortum team now has access to data after the year end across any legal entity without having to ask for ad-hoc, scattered data reporting on an individual basis.
As Mari Lehto, Tax Controller, Transfer Pricing, adds, “What I like about Aibidia is that I can have all agreements in one place, all the benchmark studies. When I gather all the information for the local file and finalize it, then I can check that everything that’s needed for the local file is actually included.”
Aibidia focused on efficiently transforming the data to make it useful on a granular level, allowing us to bring not just 200 transactions but over 8,000. It was the only company capable of handling that level of detail, which allowed for a more accurate assessment of transfer pricing methodologies and provided a centralized way to communicate with all our stakeholders.
Fortum implemented the Aibidia platform to centralize data management through Aibidia Data Studio, prepare Local files with Aibidia TPDoc, and access Aibidia benchmarking studies. The solution is now implemented with a plan to extend to additional 80 legal entities.
Workflow was configured using Aibidia Data Studio to transform transactional data into a single categorized format. In Fortum’s case, Aibidia Data Studio was used to import the raw transactional data into a centralized workflow, which was then used in Aibidia TPDoc.
“Typically, we upload the transaction data through Aibidia Data Studio and then synchronize it so that all the information is brought directly into our local files,” says Dominik.
Aibidia is assisting Fortum in streamlining the transfer pricing management process, from creating local files to data management to benchmarking studies.
“When it comes to local files,” Dominik adds, “limiting the use of external advisors to review rather than preparation has had a direct impact on our cost reduction efforts.”
Aibidia TPDoc helps automate processes related to the preparation of local and master files but also ensures tax compliance and provides valuable transfer pricing risk insights for informed strategic decisions.
“We haven’t automated everything yet, but in just one year, we have achieved a 65% automation rate for transactions – and it’s only going to increase,” claims Dominik. “It’s a big improvement.”
As the end user of the Aibidia platform, Mari agrees and shares the insight that she has found "the Aibidia platform transformative for our processes as it relates to local files. The consolidation of data and the automation of repetitive tasks have not only streamlined our workflow but also significantly increased our efficiency. It’s a big improvement in how we manage and use our data across departments."
Fortum plans to expand the use of the Aibidia platform to include additional legal entities and minimize reliance on external parties. The future goal “is to fully utilize Aibidia and not use external parties to prepare local files anymore, only reviews. It will allow us to create documents in a standardized way that can be submitted to the tax authorities easily.”
On top of this, Dominik has had a positive experience working with Aibidia. He believes that Aibidia’s team is responsible and agile in listening to feedback.
When it comes to the platform itself, Dominik describes the Aibidia platform as “a great product that has already had a significant impact. For people with similar challenges, I would highly recommend it.”
Ready to transform your transfer pricing process like Fortum? Discover how Aibidia can help your business centralize your data, automate tasks, and improve efficiency across your departments by contacting us today.
