If your accounting or bookkeeping firm serves brick-and-mortar clients like restaurants, retailers and service providers such as salons, it can be challenging to keep up with the unique needs of these businesses.
From their accounts payable to payroll the daily demands are often high, let alone the complexities that can arise when trying to meet their specific sales tax needs.
As you are likely aware, manually tracking sales tax for these clients often leads to cumbersome processes that may quickly progress to compliance issues. It is critical to make sure these clients are fully aware of their sales tax obligations, and the risks of not managing them proactively.
This is a simple and effective entry point into a consultative approach to selling automated sales tax services which benefit both the business and your firm through the efficiency gains of daily cash management and compliance that this technology provides.
Use the following selling points to create a winning sales tax strategy for brick-and-mortar businesses and your firm:
- 1. Automated sales tax alleviates the burden of collecting and paying sales tax, as well as potential cash flow shortfalls. Clients are busy building and running a business and may not understand their cash flow well enough to ensure they have enough on hand to pay sales tax on time. Some may know their cash flow, but find it difficult to effectively manage on a daily basis. Automation enables daily impounding of sales tax to ensure enough cash is available for sales tax payments.
- 2. Avoid inadvertent overpayment of sales tax. If a restaurant or other location-based business you work with uses third party delivery apps, like GrubHub or DoorDash, the calculation of sales tax is even more complicated. In fact, third-party delivery apps often result in a client paying more sales tax than necessary. The compliance issues and complexity related to managing these multiple revenue streams is reason enough for many of these clients to opt in to having their POS system tied into automated sales tax software and relieving themselves from the state’s tax liability laws.
- 3. Eliminate missed payments and penalties. With sales tax automation, taxes are automatically filed and paid on time and in full which eliminates missed payments and late payment penalties. Leverage timely filing discounts. If your client operates in one of the 27 states that offer on-time filing discounts, those discounts are automatically calculated, collected, and refunded with sales tax automation, which is a win-win for you and your client.
These are just some of the ways that sales tax automation benefits brick-and-mortar clients. This strategy also offers significant benefits for you as a practitioner including time savings and efficiencies so you can focus on other revenue-generating priorities.
Learn more by downloading the DAVO by Avalara eBook: "The Accountant’s Guide to Sales Tax Automation."
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