US: Cloud-based tax compliance provider Avalara has launched its hospitality solution for hotels, resorts, OTAs, property management groups and short-term rental operators.
Avalara provides compliance solutions for various transaction taxes, including sales and use, VAT, GST, excise, communications, lodging, and other indirect tax types.
Avalara for Hospitality will help businesses to:
• Improve compliance – tax experts at Avalara track lodging and related tax rates at the city, county and state level. The tax amount owed will be determined by Avalara and funds remitted to the jurisdictions on a regular cadence.
• Streamline reporting – Avalara will integrate with existing software such as PMS and accounting platforms to deliver rates and reporting across sales channels and internal systems.
• Improve process efficiency – businesses can write a single remittance check and Avalara will distribute the funds based on what is owed to each jurisdiction.
• Reduce audit risk – the booking experience includes tax rates to show exact charges upfront, making pricing transparent. Avalara also integrates with booking platforms to provide consistent rates.
Sanjay Parthasarathy, chief product officer, said: “Our announcement coincides with businesses in this sector emerging from shutdowns and curtailed operations, and developing a path forward to growth and profitability. Many hospitality businesses have used the enforced downtime to implement new technologies that modernise 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.”
Oliver Hoare, general manager for lodging, added: “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. 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.”
Additional capabilities and functionalities such as the inclusion of different hospitality tax types to upcoming releases of the new product are set to launched in the future.
Further information about Avalara for Hospitality can be found here.
