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December - 2016 - Special issue > Company of the Year - 2016: Compliance Automation

Avalara: Making Tax Compliance Easy

si Team
Wednesday, December 28, 2016
si Team
Post Y2K, internet just started penetrating into every business which five years back then seemed a crackpot hypothesis. This revolution was at its peak in 2004 when Rory Rawlings shared this cool idea of making internet work for sales tax with Jared Vogt in a church in Washington. He was thinking beyond tax rates such as geo spatial information, combining it with rates and taxability rules in one single engine that could speak to every accounting package and e-Commerce platform. Rory also elucidated the idea of storing and reporting this information to create a return by jurisdiction and remitting the money. Not only Jared, but another common friend of them - Scott McFarlane - also loved this business plan as they wanted to cater to the underserved market leveraging Internet technology. The trio also perceived that a single thread that spans everything is the secret key to open these benefits. By end of 2004, the trio incorporated Avalara. As a commander of the global market, today through its compliance solutions related to sales tax and other transactional taxes, Avalara enables businesses to automate the process, helps reduce compliance errors & audit exposure, increases the speed of transaction processing, and thus reduces total compliance costs; everything centered around its tax determination engine - AvaTax.

The AvaTax Platform

Having cutting edge technology in its DNA, Avalara works within a customer's own financial, billing, e-Commerce, or point of sale system to deliver accurate solution for automated tax determination & filing in real time from anywhere & anytime via a secure Internet connection. Specifically, the solutions validate physical transaction addresses, use geo-location technology to determine applicable taxing jurisdictions, identify applicable tax exemptions or holidays, check taxability against extensive tax rules and regulation database, identify applicable tax rates, and accurately calculate taxes - typically in less than one second per transaction. As each transaction is stored and immediately available for reporting, customers can either use these reports to file their own returns or outsource the entire process to the company.

The cloud & SaaS based software platform, AvaTax manages the complexity and simplifies the process of sales tax and Bharat GST tax determination cost-effectively, and with e-Commerce-class scale, speed, and reliability. This exceptional platform offers commodity level tax mapping for millions of products and services. Having prebuilt integration with over 536 ERPs, Point of Sale, and e-Commerce systems, Avalara (via AvaTax) currently handles tax data of 193 UN nations, including 23,000+ customers worldwide comprising Crocs, Adidas, Prada, Reebok, Bausch & Lomb, Jive, Webtrends, Hubspot, Chefworks, Marketo, DuPont and Georgia-Pacific.

Exploring GST Bharat with TrustFile Bharat


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