July 2026

We're introducing a comprehensive new

Tax Payments

capability in

ONESOURCE State Apportionment

that brings together setup, visibility, and automation of estimated state tax payments into a single, streamlined experience. Here's how it all comes together.

It starts with configuration. Users can now set up each state's payment rules in bulk—including quarterly payment percentages, minimum tax thresholds, the threshold that determines when estimated payments are required, and both Current Year and Prior Year Safe Harbor percentages—through an enhanced import process. Rather than configuring these rules one state at a time, you can now load this information across multiple jurisdictions and tax brackets at once, with built-in validation to catch inconsistencies before the data is applied. This configuration becomes the foundation for everything else described below.

Once these rules are in place, they become visible to you. A new "

Payments

" section on the

Options and Rates

screen under

Tax Rules

displays each state's payment requirements and safe harbour provisions in a clear, read-only format. Users can now see exactly how OSA is set up to calculate estimated payments for a given state—without needing to dig through external references—and confirm that the configured rules are accurate. This section is automatically populated with the real payment data configured for the tax rule you're viewing, and it fits neatly into the existing page layout so your regular work with Options and Rates is uninterrupted.

With the rules configured and visible, users can then take the next step: designating which scenario should be used for Prior Year Safe Harbor comparisons. Using a new dropdown on the

Update Scenarios

screen, you can link a comparison scenario—typically the prior year—to your current scenario. This linkage tells OSA exactly where to pull prior year figures from when evaluating the Prior Year Safe Harbor method, and the selected scenario is displayed on the

Active Scenarios

screen for easy reference.

With rules configured and a comparison scenario designated, you're ready to turn on automation. Rather than manually calculating and entering estimated payments, you now have the option for OSA to prepare the calculations for you. This is done simply by using specific identifiers in your

State Form Structure Import File

, and you're not locked into an all-or-nothing choice—you can automate just one quarter, such as Q1, while keeping the rest manual, or automate all of them. Any payments you don't choose to automate continue to work exactly as they do today.

Behind the scenes, once automation is triggered, OSA does the heavy lifting for you. For each quarter, it calculates three different methods—the

Actual method

, the

Current Year Safe Harbor method

, and the

Prior Year Safe Harbor method

—using the payment rules and comparison scenario you've configured, and then automatically selects whichever result is lowest as the estimated payment due. If no Prior Year Safe Harbor comparison scenario has been designated, OSA will calculate only the Actual method and the Current Year Safe Harbor method, and will select whichever of the two is lower as the estimated payment due. You never see the three individual calculations; you only see the final, optimized number. If your financial figures change before a later quarter is calculated, OSA automatically recalculates all three methods using the updated figures, taking into account what's already been paid in prior quarters, so each new quarter reflects exactly what's still owed. Special state-specific rules are also respected throughout—for example, if a state has a minimum tax that exceeds its threshold, OSA uses that minimum tax as the basis for the calculation, and if the applicable tax due falls below a state's defined threshold, no estimated payment is calculated at all.

The result of all this is a single, amount for each quarter that appears on the

State Data Entry

screen, which you're always free to review and manually adjust if needed. And if you copy a scenario or create a new one using the "

copy compliance data

" option, these calculated payment amounts carry forward automatically, so you don't have to recreate this work each time. Note that the Prior Year Safe Harbor comparison scenario link is not retained when a scenario is copied. Users will need to reselect the comparison scenario on the Update Scenarios screen for the newly copied scenario.

For users working with tax rules across many jurisdictions, the column headers on the

Tax Rule Update

page will now stay fixed in place as you scroll down. This means you'll always be able to see which column you're working in, even when reviewing long lists of jurisdictions, making data entry and review faster and less error-prone.

To improve ease of use, the "

Lock Account Column

" option in the

Display

panel of the

Apportionment Data Entry

page is now checked by default. This ensures the Account column stays visible as you scroll horizontally through your data, without needing to select this option every time. As always, you can turn this off if you prefer, and your preference can be saved so it's remembered for future sessions.