Avalara debuts managed sales tax product for accountants – Accounting Today

Avalara has released Avalara Managed Returns for Accountants (MRA), a cloud sales tax solution designed for accounting firms. MRA automates sales tax preparation and filing, providing clients with a managed service.

MRA arrives as professionals work overtime to help clients manage an increasing list of tax-related trends, including increased sales tax complexity following the 2018 South Dakota v. Wayfair, Inc. Supreme Court decision. The ruling resulted in ongoing state-specific economic nexus legislation, with nearly every state having varying effective dates, exemptions and thresholds, causing clients to have to deal with increasing levels of complexity. Simultaneously, pandemic-driven state budget shortfalls may in some cases push jurisdictions toward increased enforcement of sales tax laws.

MRA provides firms with the following:

• A dashboard to access the filing process for all clients and their returns with customizable, multiclient views, managed from one cloud-based system;
• Automatic tracking of state and local jurisdiction filing requirements;
• Support for omnichannel data imports to easily aggregate client sales information from multiple channels and marketplaces; and
• Remittance of payments on clients’ behalf. Avalara works directly with departments of revenue. Once a firm approves a client’s tax liability worksheet, Avalara handles the filing, payment and related notice management (at the firm’s request) on behalf of clients and keeps the firm up to date on filing status.

“Avalara has believed since its founding that the broad adoption of tax automation is inevitable, and accountants have always been part of the Avalara vision,” said Sanjay Parthasarathy, chief product officer at Avalara, in a statement. “Today we’re very excited to announce what accounting professionals have been requesting for years, and now require as never before — the ability to utilize Avalara’s platform to build a firm tax compliance foundation in the cloud, and address unprecedented compliance challenges for clients across industries. MRA gives firms of all sizes the ability to offer scalable tax compliance automation services to their clients, and contribute meaningfully to firm growth in 2021.”

Avalara will hold a product launch webcast on Jan. 21.