Avalara Inc's

Transaction taxes are widespread and complicated, and compliance is becoming increasingly challenging for companies of all sizes. Transaction tax compliance rules apply to all businesses, regardless of size, industry, or location. These regulations may be demanding even for a single-location corporation, and they grow immensely more complex for enterprises doing business in many taxation jurisdictions and offering a variety of products and services that are taxed differently.
Because transaction taxes exist at the interface of trade and government, political, economic, social, and technical developments may have an influence on our firm. Changes in these sectors include increasing the complexity for businesses to handle tax, government interest in developing and enforcing legislation, and firms use of technology to produce effective compliance results.
The industry that provides support for transaction tax compliance is highly competitive and fragmented, but it is maturing. Rising complexity and increasing need for automated solutions have resulted in greater awareness of external solutions and there are now multiple public companies offering automated tax compliance solutions. Avalara believes that, in the age of digital commerce, it is inevitable that all businesses will adopt automated solutions to tax compliance over time. Until then, businesses will continue to employ a mix of approaches to address transaction tax compliance, including:
tax-specific solutions from vendors, including Avalara, but also Sovos, TPS Unlimited, Inc. d/b/a TaxJar (a Stripe, Inc. company), Thomson Reuters, Vertex, Inc., and Wolters Kluwer NV;
rudimentary tax calculator services and/or people-intensive, do-it-yourself approaches that rely on internal transaction-specific research and/or purchase of tax content information from third parties, manual determination, static tax tables, spreadsheet software, or rate calculator services, as well as manual filing and remittance activities; and
outsourced transaction tax compliance services offered by accounting and specialized consulting firms. We believe customers, including customers that are business applications providers, consider the following factors when selecting a transaction tax compliance solution:
ability to improve overall transaction tax compliance;
ability to deliver real-time tax determinations;
ease of deployment and use;
ease of integration with the customer?s business applications;
ability to integrate with and aggregate data across multiple business applications to satisfy compliance for omnichannel commerce;
ability to address multiple compliance functions from registration and licensing, initial taxability, and tax rate determination to procurement and management of compliance-related documents to preparation and filing of tax returns and remittance of funds;
total cost of ownership; and
tax content applicable to the customer?s business.