One of our partners, along with our Technical Director for Real Estate, recently spent a week in Nashville at a continuing education class to maintain their MAI designation and appraisal licenses. If unfamiliar, MAI is the highest designation for an appraiser established by the Appraisal Institute. To become an MAI an individual must have good moral character, be a Certified General Real Estate Appraiser, hold a bachelor’s degree, meet standards and ethics requirements, pass rigorous education requirements, pass a challenging final comprehensive examination, receive credit for over 9,000 hours of valuation experience, and receive credit for the demonstration of knowledge requirement. To maintain this designation and appraisal licenses, continuing education classes are required to build and maintain skills and depth of valuation methodologies.

It is rare for a consulting firm to house MAI Appraisers, let alone have two on staff.  Property Valuation Services strives to provide the highest level of expertise to our Clients, including presenting the highest level of credibility to an Assessor when debating values.

Keep an eye out for our next post, as property tax deadlines are approaching fast!

Here at Property Valuation Services we use PVSpts, a proprietary tax consulting software developed to address our real and personal property tax needs. This system was developed by tax professionals, for tax professionals. Through continuous development over the last 19 years it has been adapted to clients’ requests, to comply with evolving taxing rules, to improve efficiency, and to utilize technological improvements. The software package allows us to track clients’ parcels, assets, and associated taxes to ensure proper compliance and valuation.

Many of our clients need assistance in the area of personal property tax compliance. The proper tracking, reporting, assessing and taxation of tangible personal property assets is a challenging process without the proper tax compliance software. Our PVSpts system allows for the detailed review of our clients books and records through our proprietary database to identify areas of potential tax savings. Additionally, once these assets have been entered into our system, PVS ultimately maintains an additional set of property tax books reflecting our clients assets in detail. This is extremely helpful to allow for the accurate reporting of these assets each year as these returns are typically required on a yearly basis. This continual requirement poses a problem if these returns must be created from scratch each year. In addition to this accuracy, this software also allows our firm the ability to compute, file and argue for the most aggressive final assessed values for our clients.

Property Tax is an extremely deadline driven arena. As such, a software system is critical to remind of impending tasks. These deadlines tend to be specific to each individual taxing jurisdiction. This can ultimately result in a tremendous volume of time sensitive actionable deadlines for each client’s property. Once each property is loaded into our software system, our consultants begin tracking each deadline and preparing appropriately. Our database contains years of compiled information concerning these impending deadlines providing our consultants and clients the ability to navigate with ease.

Finally, through the PVSpts system, our compliance clients can access their data via the web. Clients can access electronic copies of documents such as tax returns, assessment notices, and tax bills. Additionally, customizable reports are available.

A partner and Vice President with PVS just arrived today in Tennessee to visit with many of our high-profile Healthcare clients. Alongside them is our Director of SALT Solutions, who was requested by one of the many clients we have in Tennessee.

As many of you already know, we cut our teeth in Healthcare. Two of our partners, a former Healthcare executive and a former Healthcare Property Tax Director, who worked for the largest for-profit Healthcare Company at the time, formed PVS to fill a niche that existed in Personal Property for Healthcare. That niche has grown into providing Compliance, Assessment Reduction and Audit Property Tax services for Business Personal Property and Real Estate for over 700 clients nationwide. Additionally, the same partners formed the company State and Local Tax Solutions, or SALT Solutions, to fill a need for Sales and Use Tax Consulting that is independent and non-biased. With both PVS and SALT Solutions having niche expertise in Healthcare taxes we often work side-by-side in harmony for our clients.

PVS makes an attempt to see as many clients as possible every off-season. We want to make certain that our clients have a voice regarding our services, providing insights on the services that are working and the ones that are needing tweaks.

Our business does not exist without the work of our highly skilled staff being held accountable by the needs of our clients.

Wish us all the best as we traverse the ever-changing Healthcare market that is ever-expanding in Tennessee. Happy Father’s Day to all!

A common and unfortunate property tax misstep for companies can involve tax bills.  Keeping track of what you owe in property taxes seems easy, right?  Maybe not…

Tax bills look completely different from one jurisdiction to another. Keeping track of what you owe, who it should be paid to, when the deadlines are, whether or not there is a discounted amount if you pay it early, are there installment options, and comparing the bills against the original Assessment Notices to ensure the amounts are all correct can create problems.  This is all assuming a company has a solid process so that the person responsible receives the tax bill in the first place.

Keeping track of what you owe, including to whom it should be paid and when the deadlines are, as well as determining if there is a discounted amount for early payment or installment options and comparing the bills against the original Assessment Notices to ensure the amounts are all correct can create problems.

PVS offers a large array of services, one important service being our Tax Bill Approvals.  Instead of hoping you receive your tax bill and can translate it, let us track your notices and tax bills for you.  We will not only upload these documents into your secure online Client Web Access account, but we will review your tax bills for accuracy and send a standardized Tax Bill Approval via email.  This email will list who you send the payment to, when the deadline is, what discounted dates or installments are available, and how much to pay.  We will also attach the original tax bill to your email for your records.

Tax Bill Approvals are just one of many services we provide that set us apart from other tax firms.  Let us know how we can best help you.

Imagine your boss came to you with any of the following questions, and you do not know the answer…

“Do you have last year’s Business Personal Property Tax Return for the Atlanta plant?”

“How much did we pay in property tax last year on our Kansas City Hospital?”

“What was the value of the Dallas facility?”

“Do we know what our property taxes are going to be in Georgia next year?”

“Has that appeal been settled in Harris County?”

Our clients have countless financial, accounting, or other administrative responsibilities.  Unfortunately, managing their property tax portfolio is a daunting task and these types of questions tend to pop up at the busiest times.  Knowing all of this information, tracking assessment notices, tracking tax bills, reconciling accruals, filing Business Personal Property Tax Returns, appealing real estate values, projecting/budgeting for future tax liabilities, and reporting can consume an enormous and honestly unnecessary amount of time.

Having a firm with an online property tax portfolio management system can nearly eliminate the time dedicated to all of these processes.  With a secure login and password, you can view all of your pertinent documentation such as your returns, assessment notices, tax bills, and budget/management reports that PVS produces bi-annually for you.  From here you can check the status of your appeals, find current values as well as prior tax amounts, and run customized reports by simply exporting select fields to Excel.

Not only will PVS manage your property tax portfolio, but we supply you with the access to stay as involved as much as you like or as little as you need.

The questions above are common questions, but with our Online Client Access, the answer is literally just a few clicks away 24 hours a day.

As one of the most technologically advanced boutique property tax firms, PVS is in constant development of software to improve, advance, and run our business. Our development mantra is “by tax professionals, for tax professionals” and this keeps us focused on our audience and goals. Our initial development project started in 1999, and was an effort to track 100 columns and 1000 rows of property tax information from a spreadsheet in a database. That effort was put into production and has constantly been updated, improved and expanded over the last 20 years. These updates include numerous feature and functionality updates, vendor updates, integrations with MS Office, Acrobat, and other third-party solutions for property tax bill payments. We refer to this solution as PVSpts, short for Property Valuation Services property tax system.

That very system currently runs every facet of our property tax business to increase efficiency, ensure compliance with all the various taxing requirements, and allows us to accommodate special requests from clients. Our software solution allows our staff to manage documents, time and expense tracking, tax data, client notifications, reporting needs, and billing. Having a solution that handles all aspects of our business streamlines the workflow so that data does not have to be transferred between individual lines of business solutions.

We have undertaken an entire software rewrite project to integrate new technology offerings to further improve tools available to our consultants, streamline processes, and ensure our product is supportable. Stay tuned for more details in our 6-part series.

Do you need special notifications when certain events occur? Our software has client notifications (a fancy way of saying customized automated emails) that we can tailor to a client’s needs. Do not worry, the notifications are not sent out in spam fashion, a consultant reviews each message before it is sent. The notifications help to warn you if a value increases over a certain threshold, if an appeal is filed, or when bills are approved for payment. If you have a particular notification request, your sales representative can assist you in acquiring information on the process.

Do you have a question about an invoice? We can easily answer your questions as our invoices tie back to the events that triggered them. Our billing department can view much of the information you may need and can quickly get in contact with the consultant working the property if more information is required. Many competitors would need to check between various software solutions or worse spreadsheets to check into the detail behind an invoice.

Would you like to see your tax data and documents for both real estate and personal property? We have a web portal that allows you to view our data for your account in a secure, easy-to-understand, web format. Documents needed, such as tax bills, returns, and management reports are easily downloadable too. Our workflow for all documentation is to have it scanned into our software and then associated with the corresponding tax data for each parcel. This allows for your immediate retrieval of all information available via the web portal.

Can your tax consultant easily run custom reports for you or add additional fields that you may need to track with your tax data? More than that, can you easily run custom reports in Excel? An advantage to owning and developing our own tax software is the ability to accommodate special reporting or data tracking needs quickly and easily. We can create reports in Excel, PDF, XML, and CSV formats for easy integration with your workflow. Our Client Web Access also allows our Clients to run their own reports by selecting the data fields needed and exporting to Excel.

Does your current provider track the assets associated with your return? Most firms simply track additions and deletions, but we track at the asset level which helps identify ghost assets or additional areas of opportunity. This also gives us an advantage in obtaining and applying adjustments to ensure you are paying the appropriate tax amount for your complex assets. Our competitors do not spend the time to analyze individual asset values. However, PVS has developed multiple unique methodologies to revalue individual assets in an attempt to reduce our Clients’ property tax liability.

Do you need various local tax consultants to handle your properties in different states? Our proprietary software is designed to track the local requirements for each taxing jurisdiction across the United States.  This allows PVS to be your single provider for all states, while giving us the unique ability to track assessor history in filings, appeals and audits.  We are also developing methods to integrate e-filing into our software (PVSpts) to eliminate possible issues with mail delivery.

Given the outstanding success we have had developing our proprietary Property Tax system (PVSpts), we have tackled the in-house development of a proprietary sales tracking system (PVSsales) and Sales and Use tax system (STS) as well.

PVS has used various CRM (customer relationship management) solutions over the years, but many are generic with limited flexibility and very expensive to customization. We have taken the good from the others and combined it with what was lacking to develop sales tracking software specifically geared toward Property Tax & Sales & Use Tax prospecting!

Almost 8 years ago PVS ownership decided to expand our offerings to include Sales & Use tax and started a completely separate company called State and Local Tax Solutions, as we say, SALT Solutions. They, as PVS did in the beginning, started using spreadsheets to track vital information, from that we began to develop our own proprietary software solution. Several years of use and learning and we are on the verge of delivering a purpose-built solution to meet the requirements of the Sales & Use tax industry. Many think it is a luxury to build your own software solutions but when managed properly it can become an invaluable tool!