Avalara helps, but could use some help

Make sure to do customer and vendor address cleanup before implementation. This will help avoid calculation errors. A lot of certificate clean up should also be done before uploading exemption certificates to CertCapture especially if using managed services to validate the certificates. We used managed services to validate our certificates and we experienced a 60% error rate and needed to go back and redo the work they had done. Most of the errors were noting a certificate as signature missing when there was a signature or expired date when there was a valid date on the certificate.

Using Avalara seems to be a good straight forward process but there are things we are learning about it through conferences that we didn't know it could do. We were unaware we could see the link between CertCapture and Avalara such as the customer number passed from our business system that was used to look for an exemption and to determine taxability. We also learned you can see the tax break down by drilling into the transaction further in Avalara.

Great source for tax info across the nation, state by state. They can provide simply worded explanations of what each state considers taxable purchases. Avalara is a good tool to use if doing business in states with home state rules. Let them calculate the tax rather than you trying to keep track of what and where to charge tax.