What does Avalara Partnership mean to you? In one simple word, ‘opportunity.’ Typically, I write a feature called Advisor Alliance that summarizes the various relationship offerings a vendor makes available to accountants and consultants. But this is not your typical Advisor Alliance because there are so many opportunities afforded by Avalara in the way of Partnership programs depending upon how you want to work with them. There are Accounting Partners which include CPA, bookkeepers, and consultants. There are System Integration Partners that include VARs (value-added resellers) and eCommerce companies as well as service firms. There are also Technology Partners that include software developers, system implementation firms, and system integration specialists. Of course, there are a variety of options and alternatives within each of these major categories.
Accounting Partnership Opportunities
Since a majority of Insightful Accountant readers likely fall within the potential category of ‘Accounting Partners’, I will start there. I always say that our Advisor Alliance strives to provide you with information about opportunities to serve your clients, build your practice, and bolster your compensation by focusing on products or services from developers who offer some form of alliance, partnership, or referral program. That could not be truer of Avalara when it comes to their ‘Accounting Partner’ program.
Sales tax is a major pain point for many businesses and partnering with Avalara lets you be the hero for those businesses by solving those pain points. The solutions Avalara offers, elaborated in my earlier article, At Avalara, Sales Tax is just the ‘tip of the iceberg’ provide you and your accounting, bookkeeping, or consulting firm with not only the tools you need, but the tax expertise to allow you to enhance your service offerings and add revenues to your practice.
By partnering with Avalara, you can focus on more profitable parts of your business while still supporting client needs and expectations, still taking advantage of opportunities for co-marketing, sponsored events for clients and prospects with expect information based on new revenue streams in sales and use tax compliance with little investment or effort. And Avalara offers you three distinct ways of facilitating this partnership. Referral Arrangements let you simply earn commissions when you recommend Avalara products to your participating clients. Implementation Arrangements allow you to set up Avalara Products for your clients and earn both referral commissions as well as fees associated with your implementation and ongoing support. Embedded Arrangements allow you to incorporate Avalara products into your platform, and then offer those products as part of your firm’s bundled service offerings and pricing. To get started as an Accountant Partner, sign-up at this website.
An extension of this program is the ‘Certified Implementation Partner’ Program (CIP) which provides online training, continuing education, and support aimed at giving participants expertise in delivering Avalara products to their client-customers. There are two distinct certification courses offered for certification. The first is Avalara’s AvaTax, which is an 8-hour off-line learning experience coupled with 2 on-demand 90-minute webinars. The 2nd course is Avalara Returns and CertCapture, also an 8-hour course accompanied by 2 90-minute webinars. Both certifications courses are geared toward making certain that participants develop the knowledge, skills, and confidence needed to manage a variety of real-world experiences involving these products. Following the course work, participants must demonstrate their competency via simulated situational hands-on exercises to gain final certification. There are continuing education and minimal implementation requirements to maintain certification on an annual basis. For more details about CIP certification head over to Avalara Partner Central.
System Integration Partners
Now a lot of our Insightful Accountant readers are VARs (value-added resellers) with a variety of software or app developers, and in many cases, you may install or support the software and apps you resell. If you’re a value-added reseller, eCommerce agency, or services partner and you are not currently making sales tax automation available to your customers then they are going to be looking to some other source for their sales tax requirements. Avalara not only offers solutions that make tax compliance easy for users but those same solutions are also designed to help you serve your clients with easy-to-implement opportunities.
And Avalara makes it just as easy to work with their partnering opportunities because you can choose to either Refer your customers to Avalara via your direct referral and then earn a commission, or you can option to Implement Avalara solutions for your customer. You can even expand your implementation offerings and credentials by also choosing to participate in the same ‘Certified Implementation Partner’ program (discussed a few paragraphs above). So, if you are interested in finding out more about becoming an Avalara System Integration Partner just complete the partnership application and someone from Avalara will contact you.
Technology Partners
While we may have a few heavy-duty techno-type gurus in our reading audience, I would venture to guess that the vast majority of those of you reading this article will probably have already clicked on one of the links I have provided. Still, the same I need to at least summarize that Avalara does have a third major group of partners, and those are their ‘Technology Partners’ who most of us will recognize as the companies that directly choose to incorporate (aka integrate) Avalara products, like AvaTax into their software and apps. I can think of lots of these including Oracle NetSuite, Sage Intacct, Shopify, BigCommerce, and many, many more.
While each of these products are unique, have their own feature set, and appeal to their customers, they all share one thing in common. They have all chosen to use Avalara as their sales tax solution because they know that they can count on the reliability and accuracy of Avalara when it comes to sales and use tax management.
Technology partners want as seamless an experience as possible. While they want the AvaTax experience and reliability, they want it fully incorporated into their software/app in such a way that their users see the sale or use tax process as an all-in-one functionality. The Avalara API offers that level of sophistication, and that’s what warrants more technology partners for sale and use tax compliance than any other similar partnership. What can I say, if you are a technology developer seeking a sales tax solution for your software or app, “there is only one… Avalara!” Head over to the Avalara API page for more details.
While technically not an 'Advisor Alliance', this article is written in the same spirit as one of my Advisor Alliance features. This feature is an editorial feature, it is NOT sponsored content. Even if it contains (or does not contain) references or 'inserts' that refer to sponsored content, or sponsored webinars, the actual feature is intended as an information resource for Insightful Accountant readers.