ONESOURCE — Simplifying Global Indirect Tax Compliance

For global organizations, managing indirect tax across multiple countries is incredibly complex. Different jurisdictions, regulations, filing requirements, and deadlines create significant challenges for tax professionals responsible for maintaining compliance.

Thomson Reuters ONESOURCE was designed to simplify this complexity by providing a centralized platform where organizations can manage indirect tax processes and compliance requirements across multiple jurisdictions.

The design challenge was clear:

How might we transform a highly complex, data-intensive tax compliance process into an experience that feels simple, efficient, and manageable for enterprise users?

What Is Indirect Tax?

Indirect taxes—including sales tax, VAT, and GST—are collected by businesses as part of a transaction and ultimately remitted to the appropriate tax authority.

For multinational organizations operating across multiple jurisdictions, managing these obligations can involve enormous amounts of data, complex workflows, and constantly changing compliance requirements.

My Role

As the Senior UX Designer, I led the UX work for the Indirect Tax Compliance experience, owning the design process from discovery through delivery.

I was responsible for key UX deliverables, interaction design, prototyping, usability testing, and presenting design recommendations to stakeholders.

Throughout the project, I partnered closely with Product Owners, Business Development, Data Architecture, and Front-End and Back-End Engineering to translate complex tax requirements and enterprise workflows into intuitive product experiences.

My role wasn't simply to redesign screens—it was to understand the complexity behind the tax process and make that complexity easier for users to manage.

The Challenge

Indirect tax compliance is inherently complex and data-heavy. Our challenge was to make that complexity manageable without sacrificing the functionality tax professionals relied on.

Key challenges included:

• Enabling users to efficiently import, validate, scan, sort, and manage large volumes of tax data.
• Organizing complex categories and subcategories within limited screen real estate.
• Creating an Excel-like experience that felt familiar to tax professionals while improving usability and workflow efficiency.
• Supporting complex business validation and helping users quickly identify information requiring attention.
• Finding the right balance between our internal design system and third-party API capabilities and constraints.

The Approach

Indirect tax was a new and highly specialized domain, so I began by rapidly building domain knowledge and understanding the business rules, user workflows, technical constraints, and compliance requirements behind the platform.

I partnered closely with Business Development and Product Owners to understand how tax professionals worked and identify their most critical needs.

Throughout the project, I collaborated with Front-End and Back-End Engineering and Data Architecture to understand technical limitations, define requirements, and determine what was feasible.

This cross-functional discovery allowed me to translate a highly complex tax process into a clearer design challenge:

How might we give tax professionals the power and flexibility of the tools they already understand while making complex indirect tax compliance faster, clearer, and easier to manage?

Process / User Flow

Prototype

Importing and Viewing warning details

Sorting and Filtering

Business Validation and File Download

The next step(s)

The next step will be trying to design more ways to make it easy for user to dissect, sort and filter the data. Also continue making a custom layout for user to operate and use with ease.