Avalara Helps Small Businesses Manage Sales and Use Tax Returns

Preparing and filing sales tax returns is a time-consuming and sometimes costly process. Automated solutions provide a better way for small businesses to manage their sales tax returns process by saving time, reducing costs, and reducing audit risk through increased accuracy.

The United States Supreme Court ruling in South Dakota v. Wayfair, Inc. in June 2018 held that, given the power and prevalence of the internet, states could now collect sales tax from remote sellers. To date, 43 states and the District of Columbia have adopted sales tax laws requiring businesses to use customer location as part of determining compliance requirements.

These new laws have had a material impact on the time and resources required for small businesses to research, prepare, file, and remit sales tax. With each new state in which a business must now collect and remit sales tax, businesses face the onerous process of manually extracting sales tax calculation data from multiple sales channels, as well as navigating individual state Department of Revenue websites for filing and remittance.

Avalara Returns for Small Business gives small business owners and finance professionals an easy-to-use solution that guides users through and addresses every step of the tax preparation and filing process:

• Increase efficiency and focus on growth. Users can spend less time on sales tax preparation and filing, enabling them to focus on serving customers and scaling their businesses.
• Streamline multichannel sales data aggregation. Regardless of the source, users can import transaction information for each of their business systems, ecommerce platforms, and marketplaces to compile sales and use tax return filing for every state return from a single dashboard.
• Reduce audit or record retention risk. Users have access to an archive of all previous and current returns generated by the service for an ongoing record of compliance.

“The unprecedented growth in ecommerce has significantly increased the level of tax compliance complexity for small businesses,” said Sanjay Parthasarathy, chief product officer at Avalara. “Avalara’s new returns offering provides small businesses with an easy-to-use solution that reduces the amount of time spent on sales tax return preparation, and at a price point designed specifically for them.”

Learn more about Avalara Returns for Small Business.