How Cavalry Puts Taxonics to Work
From day one, Cavalry has focused on using technology to create a better experience for our customers and our team. A huge part of that has been the development of our Taxonics technology platform. Galen Sencil and our development team built Taxonics as a tool to enable the tax pros at Cavalry to deliver better, faster outcomes for our customers.
Now, we’re making Taxonics’ full suite of professional-grade tax technology tools and, INFORM, our real estate information database, available to a vast number of professionals working in the real estate industry including title companies, property owners, lenders, investors, tax professionals, or anyone else responsible for underwriting risk or maximizing asset performance.
Our products slot into each phase of the commercial real estate cycle and are designed to help you solve tax problems and make more confident decisions. To help you visualize how, Heidi Gilbert and Sara Chepkoit provide an inside look at Taxonics INFORM and how our own tax professionals are using it to drive results.
Heidi and Sara, take it away.
INFORM is a well-organized, easy-to-navigate information database we use to save time and share knowledge when completing projects/tasks related to real estate assessments and taxes such as tax projections for acquisitions and developments, annual real estate tax budgeting, assessment appeals, and payment of real estate taxes.
It serves as our central hub to record and retrieve “hard knowledge” for assessing and taxing jurisdictions. Basically, it contains everything a real estate professional needs to know when it comes to tax and property information for a given jurisdiction. That means our team doesn’t have to search multiple sources or reinvent the wheel each time we’re working in a specific jurisdiction. Most importantly, all of the information is researched, vetted, and regularly updated by our Taxonics team, a group with decades of real estate tax experience spanning more than one thousand jurisdictions across the country.
Here are the features and information our team uses most frequently when working with clients on real estate tax projections, due diligence, tax assessment appeals, and other real estate tax consulting work.
Jurisdictional Assessment and Tax Information
Reassessment schedules. Using current and/or historical years, the user can see patterns in the timeline of when assessment notices have been mailed in addition to the appeal timeline. It’s also simple to see how these dates differ depending on whether it is a reassessment or non-reassessment year.
Assessment methodologies. No two jurisdictions are the same – and that includes how they assess real estate for tax purposes. INFORM ensures you know how each jurisdiction approaches common assessment methodologies like income producing properties, owner occupied properties, recent acquisitions, or new construction.
Tax year timing. INFORM perfectly connects the assessment year with the tax year and the corresponding dates such as the revaluation date and date of value. In other words, it distills a confusing set of dates into an easy-to-use timeline that helps eliminate mistakes.
Tax payment due dates. You can find all tax payment due dates in one place, plus the information you need to know about them. For example, if they are annual or in installments, potential discounts if paid early, or penalties if you miss them.
Taxing jurisdictions. As tax professionals know, an asset may be taxable by more than one jurisdiction. Taxonics takes out the guesswork and research needed to determine these details and tells us if a jurisdiction has more than one taxing jurisdiction that issues their own tax bills.
Tax Appeal Information. In addition to putting assessment information in one centralized place, INFORM also helps users track important details impacting appeal opportunities. That includes appeal deadlines; types and levels of appeal; and appeal procedures.
Additional resources. You also have easy access to key information such as GIS maps, tax rates, tax bills, and more.
Continuously Updated Jurisdiction Newsfeed
Each Taxonics account also features a newsfeed that provides you with concrete facts relevant to taxing jurisdiction protocols, all provided by the experts at Taxonics. INFORM also provides functionality so you can add your own information based on the personal experiences from individual(s) on your team. That means your team will not only have Taxonics-verified information for a specific jurisdiction, but also a repository for specific details pertaining to your assets or clients that is accessible to your whole team.
For example, you can share appeal strategies and appeal results to help provide guidance on how to approach a similar appeal case or an appeal in the same jurisdiction. In other words, you can provide answers to potential obstacles teammates have already overcome. In addition, you’ll be alerted to recently passed legislation, ongoing court cases that may impact appeal outcomes in a jurisdiction, tax credit opportunities, and direct links to commonly used and required data sources.
What’s Next
If you’d like to learn more about how you or your organization can use Taxonics to improve outcomes for your business or clients, schedule a demo. We’ll walk you through the experience, discuss your use cases, and get you set up for success.
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