Avalara, a vendor of sales, use and VAT tax automation products for small and mid-sized businesses, has announced that Exact Software is the 75th product provider to join the Avalara Alliance program.
Company officials say the program, for integrated offerings within the transactional (sales, use and value-added tax) tax management application market space, has partners representing e-commerce, retail point-of-sale and customer relationship management (CRM) products in addition to traditional enterprise resource management (ERP) and financial application providers.
Exact Software, along with previously announced program participants such as Epicor, NetSuite (News - Alert) and Sage, offer "Powered by AvaTax" products, using Avalara's Web-service-based sales tax product. With Avalara's recent acquisition of Independent Systems Programming, the company also partners with Syspro, VAI, Datatel, Everest Software, TDCI and Solarsoft to sell sales and use tax calculation and compliance products.
Avalara pitches its sales and use tax management product primarily to what company officials say are "the 85 million small and mid-sized businesses worldwide." Company officials refer to what they describe as "the silent convergence of pressures including increased interstate commerce, the need for real-time tax calculation and collection during e-business transactions, governmental pressures to increase audits during times of widespread budget shortfalls, and emerging technology advancements now accessible to SMBs" for SMBs' need for sales and tax management products.
They have a point -- there are over 12,500 taxing regions in North America alone, many with constantly-changing rates, boundaries, sourcing and taxing requirements.
"Transactional tax calculation and compliance is certain to be automated," with products designed to "streamline the once manual, error- and risk-prone sales tax compliance process from end-to-end," said Scott McFarlane, CEO of Avalara. He added that SMBs expect essential functionality to include calculation, collection, reporting and remitting transactional taxes from their ERP, e-commerce, retail point-of-sale or CRM vendor.
Good to see Exact Software surfacing again, this reporter hasn't covered the company since 2006, when the Dutch CRM vendor announced that the company's Exact JobBOSS division had partnered with Okuma for production data delivery.
Okuma sells computer numeric controls and machining technology, including vertical and horizontal machining centers, lathes, double column machining centers, grinders, and wheel machines.
The Okuma-Exact partnership was supposed to provide production data such as job starts, machine hours and part counts coming directly off the machine into Exact JobBOSS, with a level of accuracy unattainable through traditional data entry methods.
David Sims is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To see more of his articles, please visit his columnist page.
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