Rochester, New York-based Paychex provides payroll and human capital management services to more than 680,000 businesses across the United States. One of the services the company offers is payroll tax administration, through which it withholds payroll taxes from the paychecks of a client's employees, then files and pays those taxes on behalf of its client.

Not surprisingly for a company filing a large number of client tax returns, Paychex also files a lot of amended returns when information included on the original return changes or turns out to be incorrect. A couple of years ago, individuals throughout the company managed these amendments in a highly manual process.

"Staff in our field locations had to manually submit requests to have amended returns completed," says Ken Bersani, Paychex's operating risk manager. "We were amending about 100,000 returns every year. Typically, the client would communicate to one of our payroll specialists that something had changed in their business. The payroll specialist would realize that change required amending returns we had already filed for them, and someone on staff would submit an amendment request to our department to start the process. The field location would also have to adjust the client billing to reflect the fee we charge for amending a tax return."