Why You Should Integrate Salesforce With Avalara

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Save your business from unwarranted audit risks by automating your sales tax, so there is no room for error. Integrate Salesforce with Avalara to get accurate sales and use tax, VAT, GST, excise, communications, lodging, etc. across the U.S. and abroad. This advanced integration leverages geolocation and address verification to calculate sales tax down to specific addresses, accounting for multiple tax jurisdictions in a single ZIP code, complex tax tiers, etc.

Avalara is a recognized leader in web-based sales tax solutions, and has been transforming the sales and use tax compliance for businesses, no matter the size. Their AvaTax family of products provides end-to-end compliance solutions. Avalara is one of America’s fastest growing companies and is trusted to be the fastest, simplest, most accurate and cost effective solution for organizations to address their statutory tax requirements.

Here are the key benefits of integrating Salesforce with Avalara

1. No need of ongoing maintenance and support

‘Avalara AvaTax’ is a cloud-based solution, that eliminates the need of ongoing maintenance and support. You get precise tax calculations instantly based on location, rules, customer exemption status, etc. You are also provided with detailed reporting required for remitting. Even the filing is done for you.

2. Powerful certificate management

‘Avalara CertCapture’ is a powerful management tool that creates, stores, manages and validates sales tax exemption and reseller certificates. It also makes them available for your easy retrieval. With Avalara CertCapture you get powerful ways to manage exemption certificates, such as immediately, online and electronically. Their end-to-end certificate lifecycle management also helps you limit your audit exposure on on-taxed transactions.

3. Offload sales tax filing and remittance to reduce the cost and drain on resources

Don’t let compliance tasks such as researching tax rules and regulations, downloading rate tables, filing returns and verifying exemption certificates, prevent your team to focus on their important revenue-generating tasks. Offload time-consuming tasks that tend to drain your finance and accounting teams, by leveraging the power of automation and single sourcing to file sales tax and remittance with ‘Avalara Returns’.

Avalara Returns takes care of your sales tax return preparation, filing, remittance and notice management. It automatically populates all appropriate tax return forms with approved data for their respective taxing jurisdictions, in just a few effortless steps. You can then issue a single payment that Avalara remits to each jurisdiction on your behalf. The integration pushes rule and rate updates to your systems automatically.

4. Get consistent tax data pulled accurately from across sales channels

The Salesforce Avalara integration gets you consistent and reliable tax data pulled together in a single source of truth. It gives you a high degree of accuracy for your transaction tax data from every channel and platform, such as your POS, social, and marketplace channels, irrespective of their being in the U.S. or abroad. It comes specially handy if you are growing your online sales and meeting economic thresholds. Specifically if you lack the time or expertise to do it in-house or your CPA isn’t specialized in sales tax.

5. Grow your business without worrying about tax complexities

For a growing business, adding product lines, going through mergers and acquisitions, expanding into new markets, and shifting technologies are a must, but tax complexities are also part of the deal. Which is why you need automation to help your business better manage the inevitable tax complications. Maintaining compliance in a handful of states is very different than when you expand your business farther in the U.S. or maybe other countries. But no worries, since you’re now backed with automation, which makes it a lot more convenient to scale.

6. Delight your customers with a flawless checkout

Mistakes like charging the incorrect tax rate or having missing or expired exemption certificates during checkout can lead to an instant loss of customer. But, with the Salesforce Avalara integration, you get real-time rates delivered directly into your shopping cart or invoicing system during purchases. Even the storage and collection of exemption certificates are streamlined to ensure a convenient, swift and error free checkout experience.

7. Minimize audit risk

Some of the common tax errors that can risk your business are, using incorrect tax rates, not filing in places where you need to register and collect, or having incomplete or missing exemption certificates. But, with the Salesforce Avalara integration you can rest assured. Since, tax compliance automation calculates rates accurately, assesses use tax, and files returns on time, keeping exemption certificates up to date and easily accessible, and you are registered in all the right places. It also lets you track exposure zones, to help make better decisions when you need to start filing and remitting tax in a certain state or jurisdiction.

8. Get regular updates for changing tax rates and rules

You don’t need to keep looking up sales tax rates or stay abreast of all the changes in rules. Because, you are covered by updates at regular intervals to keep track of and reflect the changing rates and rules in the 12,000+ U.S. sales and use tax jurisdictions.

This is how we helped a leading diet and nutritional supplement brand redefine their user experience and customer engagement by implementing and integrating Salesforce Commerce Cloud with Avalara.

Our client was a leading diet and nutritional supplement brand, catering to the US. Their challenges were their growing business’ shipping and delivery, which was now getting affected due to the limitations of their initial custom e-commerce platform (which was suitable when the order size was smaller but was not made to handle increased traffic and order volume).

They had also started facing a clear disconnect between the order management and customer service team due to their disjointed systems, resulting in

  • Delayed order delivery
  • Blind spots of stock availability
  • Lack of information available to customer service teams
  • Increasing cart abandonment
  • Brand reputation & customer engagement taking a hit
  • Drop in returning customers

Our complex implementation and configuration resulted to the following:

So, our experts at ETG proposed a project blueprint with the sole aim of optimizing their customer experience and servicing and increasing revenue. For which, an implementation of Salesforce Commerce Cloud, followed by its integration with other critical third party solutions like Avalara was undertaken. This led our client to witness a drastic increase in order value, courtesy, the ease of checkout, automated tax calculation and address verification, made possible with the integration of Salesforce and Avalara.

Following were the results:

  • There was an increased transparency due to the Salesforce Avalara integration

  • A subscriber list increment of 20%

  • Reduction in cart abandonment rate be 27%

  • Increase in month on month repeat purchases by 45%

  • The automated calculation of taxes increased the productivity of our client’s resources by 75%

ETG Digital Can Help You With Your Salesforce Avalara Integration Too

ETG is a Crest Level Salesforce Partner headquartered in Plano, Texas. We are ISO 9001:2015 certified company with a global delivery center in Hyderabad, India. We have dedicated teams of professionals spanning continents located in US, Canada, UAE, UK, Australia and India. Our ability to maintain talent hubs in multiple locations and working on projects for clients from various domains gives us a very unique advantage. An advantage to leverage proven technologies like Salesforce Commerce, Sales, Service, Partner and Marketing Clouds and using them to deliver tailor made solutions for clients to suit their business requirements.

Got a query or requirement? Feel free to connect with us. Mail us at info@etg.digital or call at +1 469 666 1119