Did you know the United States alone has more than 12,000 state and local tax jurisdictions today? In the last decade, the U.S. had a combined total of 6,066 new or changed sales and use tax rates — an average of 577 every year!
Tax rates and jurisdictions are constantly changing. Manually researching and calculating tax rates for your company is error-prone and costs you time and money. You can avoid these mistakes by automating tax compliance rates with an application called Avalara.
Here’s the really good news: FinancialForce and Avalara have a pre-built connector. As a partner with FinancialForce and Avalara, we’re able to implement this connector for you so the solutions seamlessly communicate.
Here are some reasons we recommend implementing Avalara to transform your business:
1. Avalara lowers your margin for error and audit risk.
Because sales tax rates and jurisdictions are always in flux, making mistakes is easy to do if your team is manually calculating tax rates in disconnected systems or spreadsheets. Errors in tax rate compliance is a huge risk for your business, resulting in lost revenue and even negative audits.
Avalara automates tax compliance rates for your industry and tax type. When you connect Avalara and FinancialForce, you’re able to apply Avalara’s tax codes to different products and services you sell. These tax codes will automatically account for taxation variations in different jurisdictions. The platform also provides tasks to complete each month to ensure you’re always prepared for an audit.
2. Avalara works with FinancialForce to create invoices with accurate sales tax rates.
Like we said, Avalara applies tax codes to your products and services in FinancialForce. This means FinancialForce Accounting will automatically include the correct sales tax for every invoice you send to customers and vendors.
Because Avalara is a cloud computing solution, you’ll get real-time data transfer over a secure connection. Tax compliance rates are updated in FinancialForce in less than one second so you’ll never have to worry whether your ERP solution is up to speed.
3. Avalara Returns automates and streamlines your tax returns.
Filing your tax returns manually — or electronically without efficient software — drains your team’s resources. But filing and paying your company’s taxes is easy with Avalara Returns. This product on Avalara’s platform is scalable to any size business and automates returns preparation, filing, and remittance.
With Avalara Returns, you’ll be able to access information for every jurisdiction where you file taxes in a single dashboard. Since your sales data in FinancialForce already syncs with Avalara, you can file taxes and remit payments with just a few clicks.
4. Avalara gives time back to your finance team for revenue-generating tasks.
Your goal is ultimately to scale your business. That’s difficult if your finance team is spending a lot of time on researching tax compliance rates or manually calculating and entering them into spreadsheets and invoices. Maybe you’ve considered hiring personnel to focus on tax compliance.
Avalara gives you another option. You can save time and money when you outsource this work to a platform built by tax experts and technologists. They’ve put in the time so you don’t have to. Instead, your finance team can streamline tax compliance and focus on other tasks that generate revenue for your business.
Dream a little — what could your team accomplish if tax compliance didn’t consume so much time and money? Avalara offers an affordable, scalable solution for businesses any size, in any industry. If you’re interested in implementing Avalara in your business, schedule a call today. Our team is here to help you get the most out of Avalara so you can take the stress out of tax compliance and focus on growing your business.