Avalara Enhances Cloud-Based TrustFile Sales Tax System

If you prepare the sales taxes for a small business and it’s turning into a headache, Avalara’s newly-released update to TrustFile may give you relief. Sales tax technology developer Avalara has released a major update to the cloud-based TrustFile sales tax return system that it says will cut the time to prepare sales tax returns to as little as five minutes.

Avalara has offered the system as a desktop software product since acquiring the company in 2007 and continues to serve thousands of customers on that platform. TrustFile was modernized and upgraded to an online offering earlier this year and, starting this week, businesses of all sizes can get fully populated signature-ready tax return forms based on a simple upload of their sales and tax collection data. TrustFile currently supports signature ready returns in several states, with more being added every week. The company expects its signature ready return solution to be available nationwide in early 2015.

Avalara also plans to add electronic filing to TrustFile during the first half of 2015, eliminating the need for businesses to manually print sales tax returns and mail payments to the government. The company has filed more than 500,000 sales tax returns in the past 12 months for its TrustFile and Avalara Returns customers and remits billions of dollars to state departments of revenue on their behalf, making it one of the largest filing providers in the industry.

“Small businesses spend hours every month preparing forms, filing returns and remitting sales tax in every state where they operate, often without the help of an accountant,” said Joe Davy, General Manager of TrustFile. “Avalara is on a mission to provide the fastest, easiest way for these businesses to automate this process, and signature ready returns is a milestone in this effort. Ultimately, we expect most small businesses using TrustFile to be able to file in about five minutes.”

TrustFile Online currently provides detailed sales tax reporting information for thousands of customers across more than 12,000 tax jurisdictions in the United States, helping business owners know exactly where, when and how much to file – and whether or not they are collecting the right amount of tax in each state. Business owners can also use TrustFile to print completed sales tax return forms and store a record of their sales tax history in the cloud.

“This is another major advance from Avalara for businesses of all sizes,” said CEO Scott McFarlane. “Ten years ago, we disrupted the outsourced compliance market by bringing the power of the internet to bear on the problem of calculating and collecting the right amount of sales tax. We entered the returns side of the business when we bought TrustFile back in 2007 and used that technology to add automated returns preparation, filing, and remittance for our AvaTax customers. Now we are introducing a way for the rest of the world to get in on the action. I describe the new TrustFile as our ‘turbo tax for sales tax.’ It’s another example of Avalara making sales tax less taxing.”