Use tax assessment and reporting

Automate self-assessment of consumer use tax liability across your business

See how it works

Avalara Consumer Use reconciles transactions to automate use tax compliance

Consumer use tax is owed by a buyer when sales tax is not paid in full by the seller. Unlike sales tax, use tax can be triggered after a transaction, based on how and where products are used by the buyer.

Managing use tax manually is labor-intensive and prone to error. Automation provides a better, smarter way than maintaining complicated spreadsheets or creating expensive custom solutions.

Use tax compliance has been a back burner item for a long time. This will give us the capability to finally get into compliance.

— Tax analyst with a major internet services company

Not everyone charges the right sales tax

Catch vendor errors before they become your liability

One of the most common consumer use tax issues occurs when vendors neglect to charge, or incorrectly charge, sales tax. Because manually verifying tax rates on each incoming invoice can be impossible, Avalara Consumer Use checks rates according to jurisdiction, product taxability, and any special rules that may affect the sale.

Catch vendor errors before they become liability

Manual use tax management stifles productivity

Keep people focused on the right kinds of tasks

Unburden your finance team and reduce human error by automating the complex, tedious tasks required to correctly manage use tax. Avalara Consumer Use has built-in rates and user-defined rules to determine tax obligations across multiple locations, with complex transactions, automatically.

Some businesses pay too much — or too little

Improve your cash flow

Avalara Consumer Use identifies and corrects overbilled tax on purchases to keep you from overpaying. It also makes it easy to assess and pay consumer use tax owed, so you can avoid the fines and fees for underpaying.

Complex doesn’t have to mean expensive

Gain control of self-assessment and improve compliance

Create a central source of use tax-related data and maintain a clean audit trail of your self-assessment decisions. Import data from multiple transaction sources, run liability and expense analysis, and more — without relying on expensive custom solutions.

Features

User-defined, configurable rules

Implement automated or semi-automated processes based on the needs of your business. For example, use rules to confirm consumer use tax for trusted vendors or automatically calculate use tax when the tax paid is zero. You can increase the level of automation as your business grows.

Multisite allocation

Centralized purchasing often requires use tax to be allocated to multiple locations at multiple tax rates. Automate use tax calculation and allocation; for example: purchasing equipment for one business location, but deploying in another.

Integration with other Avalara solutions

Avalara Consumer Use relies on Avalara AvaTax to calculate use tax and integrates with Avalara Returns to prepare and file sales and use tax returns, creating an end-to-end consumer use tax compliance platform.

“The overall flow and functionality of the tool is up-to-par with our high expectations of Avalara’s products. The tool is laid out so well and features are simple enough for any analyst to start working right away with a very limited learning curve.”

—Senior tax analyst with a leading SaaS firm