Avalara Announces Next-Gen Compliance Functionality for Online Retailers

Latest version of AvaTax Certs gives e-Commerce merchants a fast, secure, easy-to-use and fully web-enabled wizard for collecting sales and use tax exemption certificates from customers

Bainbridge Island, WA — October 18, 2011 — Avalara (www.avalara.com), the market leader in automated, up-to-date sales and use tax compliance solutions, today announced significant enhancements to AvaTax Certs, the industry’s most advanced online system for collecting, verifying, storing, and accessing sales tax exemption certificates.  

AvaTax Certs is designed to meet the exemption certificate management needs of companies of all sizes, serving a broad range of industries. The latest update of AvaTax Certs builds upon existing functionality that specifically targets one of the fastest-growing business segments in the U.S. – online retailers.

In this latest release, AvaTax Certs e-commerce functionality has a new, powerful capability.   Clients are now able to place a URL that launches the certificate creation wizard anywhere on their websites, providing them with additional options for collecting certificates online from their exempt customers. The certificate collection process occurs without the need for customers to leave the shopping cart environment.

AvaTax Certs is fully-integrated with AvaTax Calc and AvaTax Returns, and offers the industry’s fastest, most secure, and user-friendly product for online retailers managing customers’ exemption certificates. In addition to new and enhanced technology for collecting exemption certificates online, AvaTax Certs also offers these key benefits:

Exemption certificate verification

AvaTax Certs helps to ensure that only valid certificates are collected by eliminating manual errors related to the acceptance of improper certificate numbers and information such as W-9s or 1099s.

Electronic storage and accessibility

Digital document storage of each certificate allows clients to easily access certificates from anywhere at any time, and retain all records for the legally required amount of time for full compliance and easy access in the event of an audit.

Transaction and certificate association

Automatically associates the correct exemption certificate to the corresponding transaction. A customer need only produce the exemption certificate and its expiration date once. All transactions that include non-taxable products are then associated with future transactions with that customer.

Expiration monitoring and renewal notification

AvaTax Certs automatically tracks certificate expiration dates, and sends proactive notifications to customers, who then initiate certification renewal requests.

“The new e-commerce functionality in AvaTax Certs further underscores the extent to which Avalara is delivering an all-encompassing compliance solution to online retailers, from calculating sales and use tax at the exact address level, to offering outsourced filing and remittance services, as well as our new online, fully-automated AvaTax 1099 reporting solution,” said Scott McFarlane, CEO and co-founder at Avalara. “Our thousands of online retail customers will continue to benefit from the advanced technology features we’re building into products like AvaTax Certs, allowing them to become much more compliant, mitigate audit risk, and focus their attention on core business-building activities.”