Cloud-based tax compliance automation provider Avalara, Inc. has launched Avalara for Hospitality, a solution for hotel chains, resorts, online travel agencies, property management groups, and short-term rental operators that automates the most onerous and time-consuming aspects of tax compliance, including calculation and filing of sales and lodging tax returns.
“Today’s announcement coincides with businesses in this sector emerging from shutdowns and curtailed operations, and developing a path forward to growth and profitability,” said Sanjay Parthasarathy, chief product officer at Avalara. “Many hospitality businesses have used the enforced downtime to implement new technologies that modernize operations, streamline processes via automation, gain efficiencies, and reduce the risk of audits and fines for noncompliance of tax and other obligations. Avalara for Hospitality helps these businesses manage the full breadth of their tax compliance commitments, and deal with the many changes in rates, rules, and new tax types added by jurisdictions.”
Address compulsory hospitality compliance obligations with Avalara
Avalara for Hospitality provides the following benefits to businesses:
- Improve compliance. Maintaining accurate tax rates and rules is a labor-intensive process, whether a business is managing a single property or a chain of hotels. Getting rates wrong or not understanding total obligations can result in overpaying or underpaying taxes. Tax experts at Avalara track lodging and related tax rates at the city, county, and state level, and Avalara for Hospitality automates these tax calculations. Avalara also helps determine which taxes are owed and remits your funds to the jurisdiction on a regular cadence, facilitating compliance.
- Streamline reporting. Manually consolidating data to determine tax obligations for online travel agencies, property management groups, and hotel chains via their back-end systems is a time-consuming process, prone to human error. Avalara for Hospitality can integrate with your existing hospitality marketplace, ERP, PMS, point-of-sale, or accounting platforms, delivering consistent rates and reporting across sales channels and internal systems.
- Improve process efficiency. Preparing, filing, and remitting reports for city, county, and state jurisdictions requires significant manual effort, with even greater complexity if a business is operating properties in multiple jurisdictions or renting through multiple channels. Customers can offload returns preparation, filing, and remitting to Avalara. Avalara for Hospitality also allows businesses to write a single remittance check, and Avalara distributes the funds based on what is owed to each jurisdiction, helping to reduce costs and increase efficiency and compliance.
- Reduce audit risk, improve customer experience. Streamline processes to create a simple, reliable booking experience that includes tax rates to show exact charges up front. In addition, improve pricing transparency while mitigating audit risk. Avalara integrates with booking platforms to provide a consistent rate, no matter how your customers make their reservation.
“Avalara for Hospitality provides businesses with a technology solution to solve for an ongoing, complex, time-consuming compliance burden that diverts resources away from business-building activities,” said Oliver Hoare, general manager for Lodging at Avalara. “As hotels and resorts begin a return to full capacity, streamlining a host of back-office operations including the calculation, filing, and remittance of lodging, sales, and other taxes is essential to remaining competitive, mitigating current and future risk, and maintaining a laser focus on growth.”
Avalara will continue to add new capabilities and functionality, including additional hospitality tax types, to upcoming releases of the Avalara for Hospitality solution.
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Tags: Accounting, Auditing, Benefits, Sales Tax, Technology
