Avalara Product Pulse May: Compliance Updates & Tools

Avalara Product Pulse: What’s new at Avalara

Avalara Product Pulse is our regular update on how we’re evolving tax and compliance to help businesses move faster, reduce complexity, and stay ahead of change.

Tax compliance workflows are becoming harder to manage. Teams are expected to move faster for onboarding, exemption management, reporting, and tax content updates while working across disconnected systems and growing operational complexity.

The challenge goes beyond accuracy to keeping compliance work moving without adding friction.

In May, Avalara introduced a series of updates designed to simplify everyday compliance operations. Whether it’s onboarding, communications tax, reporting visibility, and tax content management, these enhancements help businesses reduce manual effort and improve confidence in their day-to-day workflows.

Making onboarding and compliance workflows more intuitive

Onboarding slows down when teams have to move between disconnected systems, documentation, and support channels just to configure tax settings correctly.

Extending contextual guidance directly into ecommerce workflows

The Avi Chrome Extension for BigCommerce introduces embedded onboarding and tax compliance guidance directly within the BigCommerce admin experience.

By surfacing setup assistance, validation prompts, and tax calculation visibility inside the workflow, the extension helps merchants simplify onboarding, reduce configuration errors, and better understand how tax is calculated for transactions without leaving BigCommerce. Learn more.

Expanding access to tax intelligence and rate visibility

Keeping tax rate content current throughout systems, locations, and industries can quickly turn into a manual maintenance challenge.

Delivering easier access to location-based rate guidance

DAVO Tax Rates expands POS-connected, Avalara-powered sales tax rate guidance into additional industries, beginning with retail and services.

By providing applicable state and local tax rates by location and product category in one experience, the enhancement helps businesses reduce time spent on manual tax research and rate updates while supporting more accurate rate visibility across growing verticals. Watch a demo video.

Making tax rate content more accessible and configurable

Avalara Tax Content Essentials delivers researched, frequently updated tax rate content through ready-to-use templates designed for common business scenarios.

Built for businesses that rely on POS systems, legacy platforms, offline environments, or custom tax workflows, Avalara Tax Content Essentials helps reduce the operational burden of maintaining tax rate tables while providing more flexible access to current tax content. Learn more.

Additional platform enhancements

Along with the key innovations highlighted this month, Avalara continues strengthening the operational foundation behind modern tax and compliance across reporting, onboarding, integrations, and global tax workflows.

Capability	What’s new
Avalara Exemption Certificate Management (ECM) onboarding	Complete ECM onboarding directly within the Avalara Portal with guided setup and step-by-step assistance from Avi, helping reduce implementation friction and improve confidence.
Microsoft Dynamics integrations	Reduce setup friction across Dynamics 365 Business Central, Finance, Commerce, Project Ops, and GP integrations with expanded zero-touch support through the Avalara setup assistant.
EU VAT number validation in Avalara AvaTax (VAT Determination)	Validate EU VAT IDs through AvaTax (VAT Determination) using the European Commission’s VIES service, which helps businesses confirm VAT number legitimacy and reduce manual verification efforts. Customers can validate VAT IDs individually or through batch imports and, where available, capture registered business names to improve VAT master data accuracy and support cleaner downstream compliance workflows. Learn more.
Expanded Vietnam coverage for VAT compliance	Access expanded Vietnam coverage across Avalara VAT Reporting and Avalara AvaTax for VAT Determination and manage VAT calculation and reporting obligations more efficiently as your business grows across global markets.
Avalara VAT Returns and Reporting API enhancements	Support API-based VAT reporting workflows with expanded VAT Returns API documentation designed to help partners and developers simplify integrations, improve implementation efficiency, and support scalable global reporting processes. Learn more.
Avalara Managed VAT Reporting workflow enhancements	Improve Managed VAT Reporting workflows with a new file upload experience and greater flexibility for VAT registration processes. Customers can more easily submit and manage supporting documentation, track upload status, and move forward with individual country registrations without waiting to complete all country forms upfront, thereby reducing friction and improving workflow efficiency.

Turning compliance operations into connected workflows

The latest updates reflect a broader shift in how tax and compliance work gets done. As compliance becomes more continuous, connected, and operationally demanding, the ability to act quickly and confidently is becoming just as important as staying compliant.

Avalara’s continued investment is focused on helping businesses reduce operational friction, improve visibility across workflows, and simplify the day-to-day work of managing compliance at scale.

Stay tuned for the next edition of Avalara Product Pulse.

Sales tax rates, rules, and regulations change frequently. Although we hope you'll find this information helpful, this blog is for informational purposes only and does not provide legal or tax advice.

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From operational friction to connected compliance: Avalara product updates for May

Making onboarding and compliance workflows more intuitive

Expanding access to tax intelligence and rate visibility

Additional platform enhancements

Turning compliance operations into connected workflows