RALEIGH, N.C. (8/4/15)--Sageworks, a provider of credit risk management solutions to financial institutions, has released an electronic tax return reader, which auto-imports financial data from borrowers’ tax returns produced by leading tax preparation service providers.

The tool allows credit unions and banks to save a significant amount of time--as much as 1.5 hours, according to Sageworks--on data entry per borrower, assuming an average of three returns per entity. The time-saving enhancement will be available in August as a complementary upgrade to the entire suite of Sageworks solutions for financial institutions.

In addition to significant time savings, the electronic tax return reader aims to reduce errors that can occur during manual data entry. For applicable tax returns, the technology will ensure different analysts across the institution are inputting data in the same way, which helps make credit decisions more defensible for exams.

The technology works by “reading” an electronic tax return produced by many common tax packages, allowing a Sageworks user to create the entity in the Sageworks system along with all the imported financial information.