With minimal customization and integration time and expense requirements, AvaLink offers today’s businesses an alternative to traditional integration offerings.

Bainbridge Island, Washington – Oct. 23, 2007: Avalara (http://www.avalara.com) – the market's only small and medium business (SMB) oriented provider of on-demand, Web-based sales tax compliance services, today announced it is expanding its line of tax products with immediate availability of AvaLink™.  AvaLink provides a universal connection customers can use to leverage Avalara’s robust sales tax management services with any spreadsheet, database or third-party application. Customers can use AvaLink to build links among enterprise resource planning (ERP), eCommerce, point of sale (POS) or other types of on-premise or on-demand software applications to more efficiently and accurately manage consumer use tax, sellers use tax and sales tax.

Because sales tax compliance needs to be tightly connected with order processing and accounting practices, Avalara continues to offer a number of integration options, including real-time premier integrations with nearly 75 alliance partners and a software development kit (SDK) that provides custom integrations with real-time transactional processing through AvaTax™, Avalara’s Web-hosted sales tax management service.

AvaLink offers customers a new alternative to the traditional integration offerings. In addition to presenting a solution separate from Avalara’s AvaTax service, AvaLink offers a competitive advantage over legacy solutions, which require lengthy and expensive integration and customization processes. It doesn’t actually require the systems to be integrated with one another. Instead, AvaLink extracts information—such as historical vendor or accounts payable data—and makes the necessary calculations outside of the database.

AvaLink is highly flexible with batches run based on the frequency and scheduling needs of each client. Companies can choose to run AvaLink multiple times a day, weekly, monthly or annually depending on the businesses sales tax requirements. AvaLink can be used for businesses with multiple locations or even multiple organizations, making it an excellent solution not only for businesses managing their own tax compliance efforts but also for CPA firms managing those efforts for their clients.

The introduction of AvaLink expands the market reach of Avalara, allowing Avalara to enter new markets in which premium integrations were not previously available and real-time integration is not required or feasible, as well as offering new capabilities for reporting of consumer and sellers’ use tax. AvaLink can be used in conjunction with AvaTax, or it can be used as a stand-alone, batch upload application that integrates with any ODBC-compliant data source.

“AvaLink has a proven ability to manage the calculation of both sales and use taxes and then use that data to reconcile an organization’s liability prior to remitting taxes,” said Scott McFarlane, founder, president and CEO, Avalara. “AvaLink draws on the power of the AvaTax engine’s accuracy and is very competitively priced for businesses of all sizes.”

McFarlane said that the benefits to be realized by businesses that use AvaLink are considerable. Since AvaLink connects to existing sources of data—whether they’re vendor and accounts payable for use taxes or invoices for sales taxes—no changes to existing workflows are required. AvaLink provides highly accurate sales and use tax calculations, customizes according to current accounting processes, provides comprehensive reporting for reconciliation and handles numerous remittances efficiently.

AvaLink set-up is managed by an Avalara technical service professional or a trained Avalara partner. Customers can choose between on-site or telephone service for a one-time configuration of company information and mappings of database headings in AvaLink’s easy-to-use graphical interface. Once that process is completed, businesses can identify the period for which they want to receive calculations, extract the necessary batch of data and start reading sales and use tax reports.

About AvaTax™
An SMB market-leading, Web-service-based sales tax solution, AvaTax instantly and accurately calculates sales tax for clients in any of the more than 12,500 tax regions in North America; provides detailed, real-time reporting; and automatically generates pre-populated sales tax returns. Currently, more than 10,000 licensed AvaTax users run an average of five to seven sales tax calculation transactions through Avalara’s sales tax engine every second. AvaTax comes integrated with SMB financial applications serving more businesses than any other solution on the market today, including Microsoft Dynamics GP, Microsoft Dynamics NAV, Microsoft Dynamics AX, Intuit’s QuickBooks, Sage Software’s Sage MAS 90 ERP, Sage MAS 200 ERP, Sage MAS 500 ERP, and Sage Accpac ERP. Additionally, with AvaTax On-Demand™ developers can integrate Avalara’s sales tax Web service with any e-commerce, third party or custom-build solution with use of a comprehensive Software Developer’s Kit (SDK).

About Avalara
Headquartered on Bainbridge Island near Seattle, Washington, Avalara is changing the sales tax landscape by delivering innovative and affordable solutions to small and mid-sized businesses. Avalara’s mission is to transform the sales tax compliance process by creating cost-effective, state-of-the-art solutions. Avalara does so through integrated, on demand, Web-based services that provide transparent transactions, accurate tax compliance, painless administration and effortless reporting.

For more information about Avalara, contact:
Andrea Anderson, Director of Marketing
Office: 206-780-7008