Avalara, the national web service, that maintains state, county, and local
salestaxes by taxing jurisdiction, is working on a maps technology that will
make automating salestax even more accurate.
Currently sales tax services do their salestax computations by zip code.
This method is typically only 95% accurate. The challenge becomes when clients
are paying for a web service for each transaction, their expectation is complete
accuracy-almost 100%.
It is embarrassing and frustrating to have a client tell you you charged them
the wrong sales tax after you’ve taken the step of ensuring your taxes are
correct by paying for a web service to automatically check, compute and insert
proper salestax records into your sales orders/invoices.
Avalara is a web service that has integrations already written for most of
Microsoft’s Dynamics products but the best integration is the one with Dynamics GP. The web
service works with a number of other accounting solutions as well and has large
firms such as Amazon.com as direct clients. They know salestax.
Boyer & Associates here in Minneapolis has created a custom interface for
Dynamics SL to insert sales taxes into the Sales Order screen in the Order Management module.
Our one Dynamics SL client using this custom integration saves hours on each
sales order due to the fact that one sales order can have 1,000 ship-to
addresses or 1,000 different salestax computations on one order.
Dynamics GP however offers this integration, out of the box (free), and also
allows the invoicing to come from many places in addition to the Sales Order
Processing module. The 3 clients we have using the Avalara salestax software
have been quite pleased with the time it saves and the accuracy.
I expect this improvement to be one that even furthers the lead that Avalara
has in this key “salestax as a service” category.
Please review this Bing Maps example to see how Avalara’s new technology will
work.
