Don’t Become a Sales Tax Castaway

Small and midsized businesses are disproportionately impacted by sales taxes. Sales taxes are an ongoing, constant, immediate tax levied regardless of other business activities and conditions. Overhead costs for sales tax management can include tax research time, collection and storage of customer exemption certificates, calculation and application of sales tax rate to transaction or invoice, record keeping time, filing, tax filing schedule updating and maintenance, Treasury balance management to ensure enough funds are available when the state withdraws the money or when the check is cut, and much, much more.

These tasks all make it difficult for a small- to medium-sized business to keep their heads afloat on sales tax compliance requirements. And the consequences of non compliance can be dire. In most states, it is a felony to not pay the required tax accurately and on time. In some states, not only fines and penalties are applied, but jail time is required. Many incidences of conviction have involved a small to medium business—which may have been ignorant of the laws because they didn’t think they could afford a full-time tax researcher to maintain their tax information.

Wise business owners who have already optimized their business financial processes by implementing Microsoft Dynamics GP, are always mindful of additional ways they can use their ERP to improve processes, reduce risk, and increase customer satisfaction and staff productivity while keeping costs down.

One of these areas is in sales tax management. By automating your sales tax management tasks and responsibilities using a service such as AvaTax, you can cut your tax research time down to zero. In addition, you will find savings in the following areas:

• Calculations – immediate, accurate
• Exemption certificates—reduced or eliminated storage needs; improved workflow that reduces time to collect, eliminates your need to manually manage expiration and renewal of certificates and enables staff to focus on more critical issues of credit worthiness and extension.
• Filing Schedules—no more management or updating of filing schedules; AvaTax maintains the schedule for you.
• Treasury—using AvaTax to file and remit your tax liabilities enables on-time payment discounts and allows you to employ a single deposit transaction for all your payments, reducing the need to track checks, make sure Electronic Funds Transfers (EFT) are done on time and Automated Clearinghouse Payments (ACH) go through.
• Filing—AvaTax manages filing and remitting to each jurisdiction and state.

 Are you ready to improve your processes and learn how to survive the Sales Tax Management challenge? ERPSoftwareBlog, in partnership with Avalara, is offering this FREE download of Avalara’s “Sales Tax Survival Guide.”

Learn about the challenges of sales tax compliance and how to navigate the risks associated with sales tax collection. Download now.

by Avalara