Avalara announced Avalara Exemption Certificate Management Pro, a new product that helps small-to-medium businesses (SMBs) simplify exemption certificate collection and compliance management. This new solution leverages AI and optical character recognition (OCR), expanding Avalara’s existing exemption certificate management offerings for certificate review and validation.
Certain businesses and entities are exempt from paying sales tax on select taxable purchases, but are required to provide an exemption certificate to the vendor at the time of transaction. In our digital-first world, more tax-exempt sales are happening online and across multiple channels, requiring vendors to collect and validate exemption certificates quickly. However, for many businesses, the process of collecting, validating, and storing exemption certificates remains a manual, time-consuming, and error-prone process that can lead to costly audits.
The industry’s first AI-powered automation tool for exemption certificate management
Avalara Exemption Certificate Management (ECM) Pro is a new solution that helps businesses automate the creation, collection, completion, usage, and storage of exemption certificates and other sales tax compliance documents. ECM Pro delivers new and innovative capabilities for Avalara customers, with:
An automated document validation tool that leverages AI and OCR to automatically scan compliance documents for data entry and certificate validation, leading to increased accuracy, as well as time and cost savings
A reimagined user experience based on simplicity and customization that provides businesses with an easy-to-use dashboard for visibility into the status of exemption certificates
Access to more than 35 integrations into billing, ecommerce, and ERP systems, as well as a robust open API architecture for additional integration development, supporting best-of-breed integration solutions and key tasks from within leading ERPs
A powerful integration that enables businesses to automatically request exemption certificates from customers at checkout, streamlining the certificate collection process
New tools for businesses to automate renewal requests for expiring certificates to help maintain ongoing compliance
“Until recently, tax-exempt transactions have usually taken place in person through paper-based processes. As more B2B sales happen online, the need for automated compliance document solutions has grown,” said Sanjay Parthasarathy, chief product officer at Avalara. “With Avalara Exemption Certificate Management Pro, businesses can use our AI-powered automation to manage larger numbers of exemption certificates with improved accuracy and efficiency, while also improving the customer experience across digital and in-person channels.”
Avalara acquired Tax Technology Services (TTS) in 2013 and Transaction Tax Resources, Inc. (TTR) in 2020 to create an industry-leading exemption certificate management product family, including Avalara CertCapture and TTR Exemption Certificate Management System (ECMS). With the introduction of ECM Essentials for small businesses in 2021, the launch of ECM Pro for SMBs, and future innovation for enterprise organizations, including Fortune 100 businesses, Avalara continues to add to its portfolio of compliance document management solutions for businesses of all sizes.
