General Consultant Discussion

Did anyone attend the Avalara webinar yesterday? If so, do you have any feedback or materials that you could share? I have a customer who is relatively unsophisticated selling big-ticket items through numerous online websites (think Amazon Seller type program but this is more niche for a collectible type market). I'm concerned that they may be deemed subject in the future to collecting sales tax. Actually, I'm more concerned that under the new rules they would be required to collect tax but fail to do so and upon audit get hit with tax and penalty for which they likely would be unable to recover from their customers. I'm interested in what the webinar may have shared (though I secretly suspect it will have primarily led people to logically conclude that Avalara is the only solution).

The webinar is today at 1pm EDT.

I'm signed up for today as well.

Actually. there was one yesterday, there is one today, and one in two weeks.

There is another option for sales tax integrator, Vertex have no idea if it's good/bad, but here's the link ,https://www.vertexinc.com/integrations/sage-100

Vertex is much better in some ways, but as of late 2015 their Sage 100 integration was horrible, and done in a non-standard way such that any use of custom office caused their buttons to disappear. Has anyone dealt with them lately to know if that has been improved?

The link I posted is for a video of their integration to Sage 100. It also looks like it was video from around 2017 so perhaps you can look and see if they've improved it? It's a short video.

That video doesn't show their buttons, and if you notice the screen doesn't have the * to indicate a customized screen, so it appears the video was made with a default Sage 100 screen.

I missed the first 10 minutes or so. What I heard was not a sales pitch at all.

I believe DSD did the integration piece for Avatax. Might explain why it works.

@MyronStevenson is correct, DSD wrote the integration for Avatax and it works quite well

Vertex for Sage 100 in my experience is horrible. We have a client that went live on 3/1/2018 and disconnected from Vertex on 5/1/2018. It created a lot of errors in VI for SO entry for the Ship To Address. Customer contract pricing got rounded up. Out of state and out of country reporting was problematic, etc., etc. We thought it would help reduce client's staff time in the sales tax compliance but It increased everyone's processing time. To sum it up, a big bad headache.

I have had nothing but good luck with Avalara except for one customer who ships to places with no actual address (they ship to grainerys out in the boon docks). To them, it wasn't worth the expense. Another customer was close to getting Avalara but decided it was too expensive. Can't tell you the number of calls I received from them when a number of county sales taxes changed in MN.

Because we are part of a CPA firm, we received numerous documents and opinions on the South Dakota v. Wayfair, Inc. ruling in favor of South Dakota. There are 21 other states that have laws that also consider ""economic nexus"" (vs. physical nexus), so this is just a beginning. I would imagine the remaining 24 states (4 charge no sales tax) will also be interested in this. My plan is not to scare the customers, but to point out if they are shipping to many states, they need to consider the implications. My opinion is that for those customers, they should seriously consider something like Avalara to automate this process. One key item the CPA on the call stressed is that Exemption Documentation will become very important. Of course, that is another Avalara option - tracking those.

In most (all?) cases if a user is audited and owes sales tax (should have been charging) I do no think they can go back and collect that from their customer. It all comes out of their pocket. I just can't see risking something like that. I've been involved with customers who have had several audits and they usually are not pretty. Unfortunately, until the customer experiences an audit most don't have sufficient pain.

One of our customers who was audited regularly told me that the auditor said if they had something like AvaTax with its detailed reports, the process would have been much easier for him and there would be clear documentation. In many cases, what he was finding were transactions that were not classified properly. It's open season on those situations, especially in California.