The importance of a cloud-based tax compliance solution

It wasn’t too long ago that “moving to the cloud” was the new-fangled web jargon that most people just didn’t understand. At the time, I was writing for a tech company offering cloud services and liked to picture server farms run by Care Bears (what can I say, I’m a child of the ’80s).

But less than a decade later, cloud computing has become a mainstay for many tech stacks, with more services moving off-premises for greater agility and easier management. It’s unclear if people broadly understand what cloud-based services are, but one thing is clear: it’s a vital part of doing business.

Avalara has always developed technology with a cloud-first approach, ensuring our customers are able to manage sales tax compliance with agility, adaptability, and more accuracy. 

“We built our services in the cloud from day one — well before cloud adoption became widespread — and we’ve built our business to integrate into virtually any software that businesses use to create an invoice.”

—Scott McFarlane, Co-founder and CEO of Avalara

But why is cloud-based compliance so important? Well, there are many reasons:

• Why Avalara built a cloud-based platform
• Additional benefits of a cloud-based service
• Why Avalara may be right for your business

When Avalara was founded, we were pioneers in the tax compliance technology space. Sales tax alone was complicated and high-risk, with many tedious tasks prone to human error. It was ripe for automation, and is arguably even more so today. 

That pioneering spirit never left our ethos and we’ve continued to address new problems in new ways. From the beginning, we offered off-premises services. Then in November of 2016, we teamed up with cloud-services leader AWS to offer better security and adaptability of our cloud platform.

Among other benefits, the cloud makes it easier for our customers to automatically receive rate and taxability updates, store documents at scale, and centralize data for access across multiple locations and users.

It also allows Avalara to maintain our products and services seamlessly by pushing additional features, data, and security updates directly to Avalara customers.

Building on a cloud-based platform helps our products to stay agile and up to date. But there are additional benefits to deploying services off-premises:

Integration with your existing tech stack

Cloud services allow for increased adaptability in integrating with ERP, accounting, bookkeeping, CRM, and other business applications — without creating vendor lock-in. We offer over 1,200 signed partner integrations to employ Avalara tax compliance with the systems you’re already using, including:

• NetSuite
• SAP
• Shopify
• Salesforce
• Microsoft
• QuickBooks
• Epicor

Avalara also offers a robust API, built by developers, for developers. Businesses can use a single API to adapt our suite of compliance products to unique business needs across a variety of platforms, services, and business systems. The API is supported by extensive support documentation and an SDK library.

Layered, scalable compliance 

Growth brings change and businesses often grow by offering new product lines, adding customer bases, or entering new markets. Avalara can help you maintain compliance whether you’re adding products with specialized taxes, like excise or communications taxes, or selling across borders of both the state and international variety.

Cloud-based services can make it easier to add new compliance products. Incorporating Avalara industry solutions or cross-border services can be done without massive interruptions to your business systems or extended downtime for your sales people. Avalara grows with your business — a process made simpler through our cloud-based platform.

Performance reliability 

Avalara relies on AWS, a standard-bearer in cloud computing infrastructure. By operating from multiple clouds within AWS, we can ensure redundancy and failover capabilities, insulating your business from potential cloud hiccups, so things run smoothly on your end.

The best of both worlds 

With Avalara compliance management you can adapt our services to your business needs. That includes not having to choose between the access and speed of on-premises solutions and the adaptability and accuracy of a cloud platform. Avalara Edge for AvaTax gives you a foot in both systems by accessing compliance data from the cloud while processing transactions on-site.

Tax rates, regulations, and standards are prone to change. In 2023, there were 11,192 sales and use tax rate updates in the United States. That’s just sales and use tax, in just the United States.

With changes always on the horizon, keeping up with tax compliance manually can be an impossible task. And not only is it a complicated problem, the stakes are high for getting compliance wrong. By automating tax compliance with Avalara, you can create more efficient processes while reducing the risk of error and enabling staff to focus on revenue-generating tasks.

Avalara offers solutions for businesses large and small, across a variety of industries to handle a range of tax types.

If you think automating with the original cloud-based tax compliance solution could be right for your business, schedule a call with us today. We’ll talk about the specifics of your business and what you need, including:

• Determining tax obligations
• Calculating tax rates
• Managing exemption certificates
• Complying with e-invoicing mandates
• Managing IRS forms
• Preparing and filing returns
• Licensing and registration

There’s no reason to tackle taxes on your own. With Avalara, you get cutting-edge technology and industry experts to help you stay compliant so you can focus on your business.