Avalara has launched Avalara Property Tax, a new automated solution for businesses for real property and personal property tax management designed to improve tax compliance with automation. Avalara Inc. is a provider of cloud-based tax compliance automation for businesses of all sizes.

“Today, property tax is one of the most challenging business compliance activities,” said Jayme Fishman, EVP and GM of Indirect Tax at Avalara. “This challenge is due to the complexity of preparing personal property returns and the downstream implications of assessments and tax bills for real and personal property. Further complications arise from many jurisdictions having different due dates and terms, varying state depreciation schedules, and getting data out of client systems to feed into the process. Our new property tax software solution follows our core mission of making taxes less taxing by offering businesses and accountants a more effective way to manage their property tax compliance and reduce errors while saving valuable time and money.”

Managing property tax requirements poses challenges for businesses

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All 50 U.S. states and the District of Columbia assess property taxes on real property (land, buildings, etc.), while in 38 states and the District of Columbia, business personal property taxes are also imposed on tangible property that’s moveable (supplies, manufactured goods, etc.).

For businesses, keeping up with property tax requirements — including filing deadlines and payment processes — can be a complex, manual, and error-prone process that leads to costly noncompliance.

According to a 2022 survey, enterprise companies spend an average of 90.4 hours (about four days) per week on real property tax management activities and about 132 hours per week on personal property tax management activities.

Avalara’s new property tax software solution allows businesses and accounting professionals to efficiently manage their entire property tax portfolio and compliance activities, from preparing business personal property renditions to handling and processing assessments, appeals, and tax bills.

Businesses with in-house property tax compliance teams require flexible and customizable solutions to address real and business personal property tax activities. Avalara Property Tax is scalable and can be configured to address business requirements while supporting large volumes of work to meet demanding workloads. Avalara Property Tax offers future-proof SaaS flexibility for all property tax compliance activities across real and personal property managed in one secure, central hub.

Avalara Property Tax Documents is designed to help businesses, which often receive hundreds or thousands of paper tax bills and assessments in the mail from the different jurisdictions, scan documents in one secure place. As a result, property tax data is scrubbed for accuracy and automatically appended to the correct account. Avalara Property Tax facilitates proper due date tracking, as tax bills each have separate due dates, terms and conditions, and discount opportunities. This feature is designed to help avoid penalties for late payments.

 “Property taxes are assessed across numerous jurisdictions and have varying rules, due dates, and penalties — creating complex tax requirements for businesses,” said Kevin Permenter, Research Director at IDC. “Solutions that automate the entire property tax management process from data entry to due date tracking help businesses and accountants reduce errors and enhance compliance.”

Designed for accounting professionals and professional service firms

Accountants and professional service firms that manage property tax compliance for clients require solutions that maximize the client service experience and minimize the cost of compliance.

Leveraging the automation of Avalara Property Tax for Accountants, accounting professionals can simplify all elements of managing the property tax process and valuation to ensure clients only pay the necessary property tax while minimizing risk and maximizing ROI.

Using critical standard reports and customizable business intelligence tools, accountants and professional service firms also benefit from increased visibility required to support appeals work in a best-in-class client service environment.

“In my decades of experience in the industry, I’ve worked with a lot of different solutions, and Avalara Property Tax is the first one that feels like it’s built specifically to tackle our unique challenges,” said Jeff Talton, Senior Director of Property Tax Services and Founding Member at Silver Oak Advisors. “We’re excited to be among the first to use this tailored, purpose-built solution from Avalara to help us remove the administrative burden of tangible personal property tax compliance for our clients in an accurate and efficient manner.”

The release of Avalara Property Tax follows Avalara’s acquisition of CrowdReason just over a year ago to help businesses solve property tax compliance challenges. As part of the Avalara Platform, businesses can use Avalara Property Tax to automate their property tax compliance alongside other tax compliance requirements.

For additional information on Avalara Property Tax, please click here.