'Net Features : avalara

Manage Those Pesky Consumer Use Taxes More Effectively

Michael Garrity — Wed, 20 Mar 2013 12:55:00 GMT

Running an e-commerce business can be taxing (literally), but the sales tax and compliance automation service provider Avalara wants to help lessen the burden with the release of a new, completely automated consumer use tax management solution known as AvaTax Consumer Use.

The new solution will work with hundreds of different billing systems, financial applications and enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems to ensure that it can serve businesses of all shapes and sizes by integrating seamlessly into their accounting systems.

Unlike Avalara’s older tailored consumer use tax service, this new solution provides a simple and affordable product to companies of all shapes and sizes that leverages Avalara’s powerful, accurate tax decision engine. In fact, AvaTax Consumer Use was built with a focus on small and medium-sized businesses.

In the past, consumer use tax management has been, at best, minimally supported by accounting software and ERP solutions, making the whole process not only time-consuming and complicated, but also costly. This added a substantial burden to SMB owners, as those who didn’t take consumer use tax management seriously were at a great risk, as underreported or misreported consumer use taxes “create a fertile ground for audits and penalties.”

With this new solution, tax calculations can be arranged to fit a company’s filing schedule and processed by just clicking a button; after that, all tax data will be automatically available to AvaTax Returns to further streamline the tax management process, (mercifully) eliminating complexity and saving a lot of time.

Microsoft Dynamics users will be the first to get a chance to try out Avatax Consumer Use, as the product for the Dynamics AX, GP and NAV today at Convergence 2013.

Reduce Tax Rate Headaches with GoPayment

Allison Howen — Fri, 25 May 2012 00:30:00 GMT

Merchants on the go can now solely focus on making sales instead of searching for local tax rates.

Business and financial management solutions provider Intuit has announced that its GoPayment mobile payment processing solution now provides geolocation-based sales tax calculations, which will help small businesses calculate taxes based on the specific location of a sale – taking into account the city, state and municipal tax codes, as well as special tax districts.

This new feature is based on Avalara's sales tax geolocation engine. It will make it easier for merchants to collect the correct data that is needed to file taxes, and aims to reduce customer service issues that are related to inaccurate tax rates as well as diminishing the risk of audits and fines.

The feature is available for GoPayment on both iOS and Android devices.

“Our customers wanted to eliminate the worry of complying with local tax rates,” says Chris Hylen, vice president and general manager of Intuit’s Payment Solutions division. “This newest technology uses latitude and longitude coordinates, instead of ZIP codes, to deliver the most accurate calculations available – even in the most complex jurisdictions.”

Avalara Growth Comes from OEM Partnerships

Pete Prestipino — Thu, 16 Feb 2012 00:30:00 GMT

Sales tax automation service Avalara announced that Cube Six, developers of enterprise management platform ServMan, has joined Avalara’s list of certified OEM partners

Avalara has a long track record of using OEM’s (original equipment manufacturers), those that integrate the tax management software as a service into their applications and usually under their own brand name. The ServMan integration with Avalara by CubeSix is but the latest of these partnersips. Avalara’s partner applications today apan many platform types including enterprise resource planning (ERP), financial/accounting, POS, ecommerce, complicance and CRM.

“The rapid growth of our OEM partnerships represents a milestone on our quest to become the de facto transactional tax service provider across all applications and channels,” said Avalara CEO and Founder Scott McFarlane. “As one of America’s fastest-growing companies, Avalara is proud to welcome Cube Six and its family of ServMan users into our ever-expanding community.”