2011 Review of Avalara — AvaTax

Avalara — AvaTax
877-780-4848
www.Avalara.com

From the August 2011 Review of Sales & Use Tax Systems

Best Fit: Businesses with sales across dozens, hundreds or even more taxing jurisdictions across the United States and Canada, with the need to automate tax rate lookup into their sales and ecommerce systems.

Avalara is one of the leaders in integrated sales and use tax compliance, offering systems that work in real-time with a business’ ERP or accounting system to instantly find, calculate and apply appropriate sales tax rates to a transaction or estimate in real-time. AvaTax is a suite of three products that can be purchased individually or in any combination: AvaTax Calc, AvaTax Certs and AvaTax Returns. The flagship AvaTax Calc system is available for virtually all accounting systems, including QuickBooks, Peachtree, Intacct and NetSuite, as well as systems for larger enterprises. Avalara also offers automated compliance services through which the vendor produces and prepares all jurisdictional reporting and can process payments. Avalara is also a Streamlined Sales Tax certified service provider. For businesses that don’t need integrated rate lookup, Avalara also produces TrustFile, a sales and use tax preparation system with e-filing capabilities, which is available for 12 states.

Basic System Functions:

AvaTax is a web-based solution that ties into a business’ accounting program. For this review, we used a QuickBooks company file, and after a guided implementation call with a support representative (which is offered to all users), the system then became an integrated component of the QuickBooks system. During this system setup, the inventory products, SKUs and other data is mapped to appropriate taxation rules, enabling the program to be automated afterwards.

From that point on, the program basically runs on auto-pilot, with little day-to-day interaction by users, since the system automatically finds the most up-to-date tax rates for a transaction, based upon nexus, customer location, shipping information, special tax rules, exemptions and holidays as they may apply to particular types of products in different states and localities. When the appropriate rates are determined, it appears as a line item in the transaction, with the ability to drill down to sub-jurisdictional taxation (state/county/city/district). Additional management options, including reporting, forms generation, exemption certificate management and tax liability reports, are available through a web-based management console, as is access to the outsourced option for forms compliance.

AvaTax can support companies with any number of locations, as well as multiple companies being managed using the same accounting system (multiple companies in QuickBooks in the case of this review), which allows it to be used by firms managing compliance for multiple clients. The web-based transactional reporting also gives users the ability to remotely check reports and filings from any location, even if their accounting solution does not have remote access options.

Compliance Capabilities:

AvaTax maintains a live database with tax rates for more than 14,000 jurisdictions in the United States and Canada, and also offers VAT compliance for 39 countries. Since the sales tax engine is integrated into the accounting solution, all jurisdictions are tracked along with rules regarding mandatory or voluntary reporting compliance.

The back end of the tax engine uses the AvaTax Jurisdiction Assignment system, which considers various factors, including an advanced database and geospatial coding, to pinpoint any address or location within all applicable tax jurisdiction boundaries. All sales tax application details are available on drilldown screens that also segregate transactions by jurisdiction.