Avalara Tools Provide Tax Automation and Resources for Small Businesses

Manually managing tax compliance requirements can be extremely difficult and time consuming as well. It can also be costly as your business can face penalties and fines if you get it wrong. This is why it is absolutely critical for you to get yourself an automated system that will help you reduce risks and complexities, allowing you to focus on your primary expertise.

Enter Avalara, a service-based platform for sales tax and compliance automation that you may have never heard of, but they have been making commerce happen since 2004. The company offers cloud based solutions designed to help companies stay focused on their core business by providing them with automated end to end compliance services that include exemption certificate management, sales and use tax calculation, filing and remittance as well as a broad array of related services.

The company also offers hundreds of pre-built integrations in most major ERP systems, POS systems and mobile platforms, eCommerce shopping carts and accounting packages.

While Avalara serves the big players in the market like Etsy and PayPal, the company has also been expanding its partnerships with leading software solutions for small businesses. Recently, the company partnered with Fishbowl, a popular standalone solution for organizations tracking assets and a manufacturing and warehouse management solution for QuickBooks and Xero.

“Avalara's leading tax compliance solution is a natural fit for Fishbowl,” said Fishbowl CEO David K. Williams in an official release. “Fishbowl helps manufacturers, wholesale distributors and eCommerce businesses selling to customers across the U.S. and beyond. It's essential they include the correct sales-tax figures to their sales orders; Avalara does that, and more. We're excited to partner with Avalara to help our customers automate sales-tax calculations and simplify that complex side of doing business.”

Avalara has formed hundreds of such partnerships with leading software solutions for small businesses, allowing users to automatically calculate sales tax for every invoice line item in real-time.

Easily Remit Tax in All 50 States

In addition, Avalara gives you the ability to access Avalara TrustFile, a feature letting you prepare and remit tax in all 50 states. So the software could save small business owners countless hours of manual effort. “On average, a small business owner can save about five hours a week if they automate their sales tax compliance, freeing up time to focus on things that can help grow their business, like developing new products, new sales channels, targeted promotions, and employee training,” Avalara's senior director of media strategy Sharon Tully Kane told Small Business Trends.

Small Business Community Center

Avalara also has a small business community center, where you can download white papers, look up tax rates, register for free webinars, discover connector integrations with leading eCommerce, mobile commerce, accounting and invoicing applications, test drive Avalara's solutions TrustFile and AvaTax, browse a directory of accounting firms and learn more about where sales tax must be collected and remitted.

Coverage

Avalara offers more than 500 hundred pre-built connectors into leading ERP, eCommerce, accounting, and other business applications. The company's Compliance Cloud platform is updated continuously and processes billions of transactions for its more than 20,000 customers globally.

Summary of Avalara Tax Tools

Avalara is an established provider in the tax compliance space and SaaS sales space. The company boasts a comprehensive suite of services and solutions that many businesses need to remain tax compliant.

The company also offers a host of free services that many small businesses might be able to take advantage of. Such services include a free exemption certificate manager (AvaTax CertExpress), an online version of AvaTax Calc for small online sellers and free tax rate tables (AvaTax Rates). AvaTax packages will cost you somewhere between $50 and $200. It all depends on the complexity of your business needs.

Image: Avalara

This article, "Avalara Tools Provide Tax Automation and Resources for Small Businesses" was first published on Small Business Trends