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Why automate tax compliance?
The better question is: Why burden your business with something so complex and tedious when it can be solved with software in the cloud?
Decrease the high cost and drain on your business
Employee time and expertise are expensive
Without automation, your tax professionals are probably buried in endless tasks that could be offloaded. Every hour spent on tax management is an hour lost on other (more important) parts of your business.
Government requirements are increasingly complex and vast, as rates, product taxability rules, and tax laws are constantly in flux. Without automation, your business is likely taking on unnecessary risk.
With up-to-date rates and rules maintained by a cloud-based tax engine, automated tax software can increase the accuracy of your tax compliance.
With automation, rate calculations are more accurate, use tax is assessed, returns are filed on time, exemption certificates are up to date and easily accessible, and you’re registered in all the right locations.
"We answer with such confidence and authority now; the auditors have moved on to someone else."
Company growth can create more tax pain. Entering new markets and adding sales channels, employees, products, and/or services can trigger new obligations to register and file in more locations.
So, too, does expanding into international markets. With global sales come more complicated tax rules and an additional set of tax jurisdictions. Value-added tax (VAT) and goods and services tax (GST) are applied differently than U.S. sales tax. And every country’s tax rules are different.
Automation decreases the tax complexity that often comes with business grow. The effort required to maintain compliance in a few states is vastly different when you do business in most of the U.S. And selling into more countries adds a whole new level of complexity. With automation, it’s easier to scale.
"I don’t worry about sales tax at all now. If we turn on 15 more states tomorrow, we wouldn’t have to worry about a single thing."
Get more out of your existing technology and systems
Add tax compliance to your business applications
You’re likely already automating critical parts of your operations with ERPs, ecommerce platforms, and other business applications. Get more out of your investments by connecting tax software into the systems that power other parts of your business.
Automated tax solutions like Avalara integrate into the most widely used solutions or offer an open API, which allows you to manage your tax compliance within a single dashboard.
"We just publicly announced another pending acquisition, and the ability to take in a new revenue stream, port it into Zuora, and immediately be compliant — that scalability is really nice."
Physically store hard copies for every tax exempt customer
Validate documents at point of sale
Manually retrieve documents as requested by auditors
Monitor certificate expirations and request updated documents as needed
Upload exemption certificates into cloud software
Access current certificates digitally at the point of sale
Direct auditors to customized dashboards for document retrieval
On average, companies with $10 million or more in revenue have six finance professionals who spend 25% of their time on sales and use tax compliance related tasks.
How much can you save with sales tax compliance automation?
Find out in real time how much you could save automating with Avalara.
Step
Hours
Rate
Months
Savings
1. Registration
X
{registration}
X
$55/hr
X
12
=
{registrationsavings}
2. Tax rates
X
{taxrates}
X
$55/hr
X
12
=
{taxratessavings}
3. Returns
X
{taxreturns}
X
$55/hr
X
12
=
{taxreturnssavings}
4. Exemption certificates
X
{exemptions}
X
$55/hr
X
12
=
{exemptionssavings}
Step
Revenue
Tax rate
Penalty
Savings
5. Tax liability
X
{revenue}
X
{penalty}
X
{rate}
=
{revenuesavings}
Total potential annual savings: {totalsavings}
The information provided by this calculator is intended to be a rough approximation only. The estimate shown here may not reflect actual time and cost savings.
