Reduce operating costs and tax liabilities with Avalara Property Tax

Managing real and personal property tax is among the most challenging, time-consuming, and costly compliance activities a business will encounter because of the volume of tasks involved. Companies tend to dedicate far more time than necessary to maintaining property tax compliance. Handling compliance manually or using property tax management software with limited or outdated product functionality could result in costly errors.

The process of assessing property values often requires extensive research, data analysis, and a thorough understanding of local tax regulations.

The administrative burden of preparing and filing property tax returns for multiple properties across different jurisdictions can quickly become overwhelming. Each jurisdiction may have its own set of forms, deadlines, and requirements, necessitating meticulous attention to detail to ensure compliance and avoid penalties.

Tracking changes in property tax rates, regulations, and assessment methodologies can be time-consuming and prone to oversight. Businesses must make sure they’re using the most up-to-date forms and rates from each jurisdiction. Without an automated solution, a property tax professional would have to source this information manually. 

Managing property tax bills is another challenge, largely because it’s also a paper-based process. Companies receive hundreds or thousands of property tax bills in the mail. Most bills arrive between October and January from the different jurisdictions, each with different formats, terms, discount opportunities, due dates, etc. And, each bill must be paid on time.

Inaccurate data or forms, missed due dates, overpayments, and penalties consistently chip away at an organization’s profitability. Meanwhile, heavy workloads, complexity, tight deadlines, and high-stakes consequences increase the pressure, stress, and burnout of property tax staff.

Cumbersome manual systems stand in the way of growth. While some businesses are using tools (other than Microsoft Excel) to manage property tax compliance, they often fall short as the technology is outdated, holds inaccurate data, is incapable of scaling, or lacks integration.

Businesses can benefit by investing in cloud-based solutions that centralize real and personal property tax management bills, documents, assessments, due dates, forms, return preparation, and appeals in one secure hub, minimizing data entry, maximizing accuracy, and automating the process of appending property tax documents to tax bill payments. When selecting a solution to help with property tax compliance, consider how it will help solve these common business challenges.

The increased volume and complexity of tasks associated with property tax management places an unbearable strain on staff and further exposes the business to missed due dates and excessive fees and penalties.

Expanding operations, such as acquiring new properties through mergers and acquisitions or opening up additional locations in new jurisdictions, increases the number of properties subject to property tax assessments and bills. 

Businesses with in-house property tax compliance teams need flexible and customizable solutions to address real and business personal property tax activities. 

Avalara Property Tax is scalable and can be configured to address business requirements while supporting large volumes of work to meet demanding workloads.

In our survey, 73% of enterprise companies rated the ability to append property tax documents to tax bill payment and create an audit trail as the most important feature for an automated property tax management solution. 

Avalara Property Tax helps reduce the risk of property tax audits by maintaining an audit trail of all changes made to property tax data, including user actions, updates, and approvals. This robust audit trail provides transparency and accountability, allowing businesses to track the history of changes and demonstrate compliance with internal controls and audit requirements.

Reporting and delivering actionable insights from traditional manual property tax compliance processes or outdated solutions is a headache for businesses. There is an inherent lack of visibility into property tax data, making it difficult for businesses to track tax liabilities, monitor compliance, and identify opportunities for operational efficiency. 

The process is resource intensive, complex, littered with inaccurate data, and difficult to scale as the business grows, increasing the risk of missing filing deadlines, catching changes in tax rates and other regulatory requirements, and exposing businesses to penalties and increased risk of audit. 

Avalara Property Tax empowers tax teams with actionable insights, analysis, and documentation to effectively manage property tax compliance, audits, assessments, appeals, planning, and regulatory requirements.

According to the Potentiate survey, on average, enterprise companies spend 90+ hours per week on real property tax management activities and an average of 132 hours per week on personal property tax management activities. 

However, staff are still overwhelmed by the burden of administrative tasks, especially during peak periods when attempting to adhere to tight tax filing deadlines or when dealing with multiple properties across different jurisdictions. Without adequate property tax management software in place, staff will struggle to cope with the demands of their workload, potentially leading to feelings of frustration and burnout, and the increased likelihood that businesses risk losing key staff.

Comcast property assets sprawl across jurisdictional boundaries, making property tax compliance a complex puzzle. 

“We’ve got cables and all sorts of other electronic infrastructure that doesn’t really recognize jurisdictional boundaries,” says Allyssa DeCenzo, a property tax manager at Comcast. “We were doing all allocations manually, and then printing and mailing the returns for each jurisdiction.”

Property tax returns were due every two weeks of the first six months of each year. The manual effort to process and file thousands of them was a severe drain on the team.

Adding to the concern, the entire process was largely undocumented — it lived in the brain of a single compliance manager — creating another layer of risk. “We needed a consistent, centralized process that was accessible for everyone on the team,” says Allyssa.

Avalara Property Tax acted as a secure hub for real property and business personal property tax information and tax-related activities for Comcast. The solution automates data entry for critical assessment notices and tax bill document management, deadline management, asset categorization, and depreciation schedules. It also offers return form generation, assessment notices, appeals, and tax bills in one system. In doing so, it significantly streamlines Comcast’s compliance processes.

“Based on certain metrics that we provide, Avalara Property Tax distributes the costs at the asset-class level; this gets allocated down to the individual jurisdictions and locations that our assets are located in.”

— Allyssa DeCenzo
Property tax manager, Comcast

Avalara Property Tax offers flexibility for all property tax compliance activities across real and personal property managed in one secure, central hub. It provides users immediate access to forms across all assessing jurisdictions, facilitating the management of deadlines, asset categorization, depreciation schedules, return form generation, assessment notices, appeals, and tax bills in one system.  

Key reports provide users with instant visibility of the complete property tax management cycle, including due dates, values, and more — this approach quickly identifies missing notices or bills with system-maintained jurisdictional deadlines.

The Avalara Property Tax Documents module rapidly extracts all essential property tax data from scanned notices and tax bills from hundreds of documents while standardizing the data and appending it to the correct accounts. These solutions provide more time to determine and challenge property value assessments.

Ready to connect? Talk to one of our property tax experts to see how we can help your business reduce operating costs and tax liabilities. Get started.