Sage 100

Are many using an NFR copy of Avalara AvaTax internally? I had an e-mail from Avalara saying the offer was only good through 12/31, but I thought this was always available. Apparently not. The only sales that we tax are hardware items, since software is downloaded for the most part, so I am not sure the volume justifies it.

We use it. Services are taxable in Texas and Florida. Since we have employees working from their homes in those states, we have nexus. In some states, if you go to the state to render services, you are considered to have nexus. If you look at all the tax classes defined in Avalara, it will make your head spin. Last I looked there were over 5,000 different ways to classify things; from software (prewritten, resold, custom developed, etc), services on software (each category previously listed), hardware (timeclocks, routers, pc's, etc.) All those codes exist because one state or county or municipality in the US handles it uniquely. It was fun setting up the labor and item codes in our accounting system to handle it all. The alternative approach is to not report at all and hope they never find you.

@ShawnSlavin Thanks for the input. It seems that having AvaTax in place makes this one less thing to be concerned about, especially as state and local governments look for ways to increase their incomes.

Just reviewed a customer's first month's sales tax info on the Avalara dashboard with them. She didn't realize there were three nexuses they had never reported on before. I had pitched Sage Sales Tax to them in the past but after being audited, they decided it was just too difficult to determine which taxes each customer was subject to. There are quirks to get used to but a good product overall. (Speaking from my orange outlook, of course.)

Our NFR account is still active, though we used only for a couple of years, primarity to gain real-life experience. Overwall, its a good solution. However, we found that sometimes they used the wrong rates which they stood behind even though we proved it wrong. Reconciliation to back office can be problematic because they only use invoice dates, not transaction dates. They don't capture Source Journal so finding discrepancies is hunt and peck. You can't use the same invoice number or it will clobber the prior one. Reporting is challenging when attempting to complete CA Sales and Use tax return. For our client with international sales, you needed multiple reports to complete the CA return. For our client that drop ships to end users for catalog and online retailers with a CA nexus, it works well.

Someone needs to tell my barber if services are taxable in Florida, @ShawnSlavin.

Not all services are taxable. I can only speak for ""services rendered in connection with packaged software"".

Just teasing.

Florida has funky rules. A cleaning service performed in a home is not taxable, but performed in a commercial office is. Perhaps a personal cut is not where a business cut is?

@RobertWood Is that what your barber does?

Florida's rules are strange. Custom Crystal Reports and Custom Office mods can be enough to make the whole thing non taxable some times. Same if the software is delivered via the web.

That makes Florida stranger than California then. Have to really work at that.

No worries @RobertWood, I recognized the tweak. There are a number of states with UNIQUE (that's the nicest way I could think to put it) tax rules. Texas has some really funky tax laws in the oil field as well. What a PITA!