How Avalara can Make U.S. Sales Tax Headaches a Thing of the Past

Sales Taxes in the United States are complicated, especially when you sell out of state. If you need help figuring it all out here’s how Avalara can help!

Fun Facts about U.S. Sales Tax 

• If you buy a bagel in NY, its Non-Taxable. But if it’s cut in half its Taxable.
• 12,000+ taxing jurisdictions in the US today
• 45 States have state sales tax
• 14,000 changes to rates and jurisdiction occur on an annual basis
• $67,000 is the average spent by mid-size businesses per year to manage sales tax
• $114,000 is the average cost of an audit today—up 19% from the previous year.

WHO benefits most from sales tax automation?

• Companies that have a high level of business complexity
  • Large number of products and SKUs
  • High volume of transactions
  • Selling in multiple locations and at the international level
• Companies that are growing their business as a result of mergers, acquisitions, and expansions to new locations and channels
• Companies that sell to wholesale, drop ship, have inventory in multiple states.

WHEN is it time to talk about tax compliance?

• Changes to the company structure
• Going through an audit or getting a notice for an upcoming audit
• When your employees are spending too much time dealing with sales tax
• If you are concerned about an audit or mistakes in sales tax collection

WHY it makes sense to automate sales tax management

• Sales tax is complex. There are more than 12,000 taxing jurisdiction in the U.S. Each of the 45 states that collect sales tax has different rules and regulations around what and how products and services are taxed or exempted from sales tax.
• The rules for sales tax are constantly changing and will continue to do so.
• Managing sales tax manually is a long and tedious process that drains a company’s resources.
• It’s very high risk. If any mistakes or discrepancies are caught, it will result in major penalties by the government for non-compliance.
• Automating sales tax can reduce the amount of time, money and risk that impact your business related to compliance-related activities.

WHERE Avalara saves customers time and money

• Eliminates the tedious work and complexity that goes into manually calculating and reporting sales taxes.
• Improves transactional tax accuracy to dramatically reduces their risk of costly negative audit results
• Provides a scalable and affordable means to outsource a tedious activity that doesn’t add value to their business and has a high rate of error and risk when handled internally.

HOW Avalara’s technology works:

• Ease of Use. Avalara’s products are cloud-based SaaS solutions. No need to worry about costly on-premise software, hardware or licenses. Tax rates, rules, and boundaries are managed in the Cloud so that you always have up-to-date accuracy and real-time delivery.
• Fast deployment. Pre-certified integrations to 300+ ERP, e-commerce and accounting systems means you can get up and running quickly. No disruptions to your business from lengthy deployments.
• Secure, real-time data transfer. For any transactions, your system communicates with Avalara over a secure connection. The tax information is returned directly to your system in less than a second.
• Robust data capture and reporting. No need to research tax rates, build tax tables or make tax decisions in the order entry process. Once an invoice is posted the information is captured in a robust database/ reporting engines.

Fast reconciliation. Instead of running reports and filling out forms, cutting checks and mailing multiple tax payments, AvaTax customers simply reconcile a single monthly worksheet and pay one amount for their total tax obligation.

With up to 600 unique integrations including NetSuite, Rootstock, and Salesforce all you have to do to stay on-track with U.S Sales Taxes is add Avalara and forget about it!

For more information about Avalara feel free to contact us!