Scaling Field Services Operations without Surprises, Powered by Modern Sales and Use Tax Solutions

Hello everyone. Welcome to our webinar for today. We'll get started momentarily, just kind of letting everyone trickle in. And as people are joining, you'll know if you're an attendee, you'll just be on mute. So don't be alarmed if you can't unmute. That's by design. You will have a q and a. So if you have questions throughout, I'm just gonna kinda keep repeating myself as people start trickling in. I think we've gotta in a couple minutes, we'll do, an icebreaker poll, pass it over to Patty for the introductions. Alright. Well, without further ado, I'm Cheyenne De Fries. I'm the manager of sales and strategic partnerships here at Databasics. Welcome to this webinar. Before we get started, we're gonna kick off with a little icebreaker poll. Maybe give just a couple more seconds for other people to trickle in. Should be showing up on the stage here. What actor has appeared in the most films directed by Martin Scorsese? Vote now. Show us what you got people. I'm not actually sure I know the answer to this. Oh, it's looking pretty landslidey. Tied now. It's a nail biter. Alright. Get your final votes in. We'll reveal the answer when I know it. I don't actually know the answer yet. We'll reveal that at the end. Stay tuned to find out what the correct answer So welcome again everyone just in case you didn't hear it. You will be on mute for this whole thing, but there is a Q and A little section over on the right. So if you have questions, please feel free to submit them throughout and we will make sure that they're answered either throughout this webinar or we'll reach out to you after if there isn't time to actually answer them during this. There's some items that you can expect on the stage here. I think I've pretty much outlined it all. And Patty is going to be the one giving our introductions. So I'm gonna go ahead and pass things over to her and we'll get started on our webinar for today. Great. Thank you, Cheyenne. Hey, everyone. Thank you so much for joining us today. As Cheyenne said, I'm Patty and I'm on the Databasex team where I manage our strategic alliances. And we're super excited to have you joining our webinar today because today we are joining voices with our fantastic partner Avalara. And today's session, Scaling Field Services Operations Without Surprises, is all about how Sampro and Avalara work together to simplify sales tax as your field service business grows. And as operations scale, tax complexity can really sneak up on you. And this is where a strong connected solution really will make a difference. So we're going to show you the value of the integration and how it helps teams stay compliant without slowing down. So let's dive in. First of all, I would love to introduce to you our fabulous subject matter experts today. With Avalara, we have Christine Martin, and Christine is a senior partner solution consultant at Avalara based in Montana with more than twenty five years of experience in sales and use tax. She began her career with an international hospitality company and has since held key roles, including senior tax manager at a large paper manufacturer, director of compliance for a leading telecommunications tax outsourcing provider and partner channel manager in business intelligence and finance reporting. Christine is widely recognized for her expertise and is a sought after speaker on sales and use tax compliance. And our own resident subject matter expert Grace Cupra. Grace is the director of professional services and support at Databasics. And prior to joining us, she spent fifteen years in the HVAC industry working for mechanical contractors, including two years as a direct end user, which we love of the Databasex platform. And this firsthand experience just really gives her a unique perspective on the real world challenges customers face and how technology can support field and back office teams. And last but not least, we have John Lesage. John brings over forty years of experience in the service industry with a strong background in telecommunications and security sectors. He spent seventeen years as a Sampro end user and administrator developing extensive hands on and system expertise and joined Database six five years ago. He currently serves as a software software support representative, where he leverages his deep industry knowledge to support our customers and develop effective solutions. So we have a great panel for you today, and we are really excited to get started. So I'm going to go ahead and hand it over to our first speaker, Christine with Avalara. Take it away, Christine. Thanks so much, Patty, and thank you guys for doing this. This is fantastic. So let's kind of set the groundwork on sales and use tax and what this complexity is. And we like to think of this almost like an iceberg that what you see at the top, there's maybe something bigger at the bottom. So we think about sales tax or most people think about sales tax as you've got to file the returns, you've got to have exemption certificates, ten ninety nine, not necessarily a sales tax thing, but it's still compliance. That's kind of what people think of the sales tax. But then there are some deeper things that are below the surface level that everybody should be thinking about. Consumer use tax, probably the hardest when it comes to the sales and use tax piece is what things am I using in my business? Are my vendors charging me tax? Am I giving things away to my customers that I did not pay tax on? Those have some consumer use tax obligations. But what about how do I charge tax when I am in multiple jurisdictions? How do I make my company audit proof so when an auditor walks in and wants to see information that I can easily find it and defend my position? How do I keep up with these exemption certificates that I spent so much time gathering and putting in a filing cabinet? And what about the research of things? Because rules are changing. I was watching the news last night and saw a whole bunch of changes that are getting ready to happen in the state of Virginia. And it really got me wondering, how do people do this by themselves without any tools? So I want you to think about sales tax, not just from this upper level that we see all the time, but really deeper as well. And we've reached out to thousands of customers and asked them, what is the most challenging thing about sales tax? And what we heard resoundingly from fifty percent of those people is keeping up with all these law changes. Virginia coming up here. The state of Washington had big changes that happened October first of last year. California just implemented this new embedded battery waste fee. So trying to keep up with all of that manually is really what we hear people loud and clear that they just have a hard time keeping up with. But then right behind that is managing nexus. And nexus meaning where are you required to collect and remit tax. And back in the day when I started my career, it was really easy where you had a physical presence, whether that was employees, whether that was having inventory, whether you had a building, that was pretty easy. But then insert economic nexus and that Wayfair versus South Dakota, South Dakota versus Wayfair case, and that blew everything out of the water. And people that didn't have to charge tax before because they didn't have a physical connection to a state now may have to charge tax all across the country. And go back to this first piece of, that's really hard to keep track of all the rules and the rates, etcetera. And that we've also heard, especially from the service industry, about managing exemptions. I worked for a paper company. I worked for a telecommunications company and a hospitality company, and we had a lot of exemptions in all of those. And what I did, kind of how I got my job at Avalara, is we had paper copies. They were in binders, they were in folders. When I left the paper company, we actually had them scanned and they were attached to customer records. But I got to tell you, when it came time to find them for an audit, that was weeks and weeks of time trying to find the needle in the haystack and calling customers and trying to get new certificates as well. So this exemption piece paired with economic nexus and then tagged in with all of these changes really makes this whole sales tax piece complex. And let's add in the international piece, something that may not necessarily impact you all, but international is something that we're paying an awful lot of attention to for electronic invoicing. There's many countries that are having these mandates that require companies doing business in their country to have electronic invoicing. And there's a few different methods that people have to follow to meet these requirements for electronic invoicing. So at its face, people think sales tax is pretty easy because you buy something, you apply tax. But when you put your hat on that you are now in this seat where you have got to figure out where you have to charge tax and what you have to charge tax and then how you report it really is the complexity itself. So why are sales why is sales tax so challenging? We talked about that, but let's dig into this a little bit more. Calculating sales tax. There was an organization that came about years ago called the Streamline Sales Tax Organization. And this was kind of stepping towards this economic nexus thing and trying to get rid of consumer use tax. But these states got together and said, how can we make people voluntarily register to become taxpayers? Maybe if we standardized our definitions, not the taxability, but the definitions, more and more people would voluntarily become taxpayers and begin collecting on our behalf. So these states work together to make sure that the definition of candy was the same and the definition of shipping was the same, etcetera. It didn't make people want to become taxpayers. So these definitions are important because that relates to how things are taxed. What is it that you are selling? How is it determined to be taxable? And then at what rate? When I worked for the telephone company, VoIP was an up and coming thing And funny, it did not meet the definition of a telephone call. Telephone calls, all the definitions related to two copper wires and VoIP did not fit into that. So managing these things and these nuances and the tax research, mean, trying to find out the taxability of something, you can call customer service and talk to Mary. And Mary says, yeah, I think it's taxable. But the next day you've got a couple more questions, so you call Bob in customer service at the state. And Bob says, Oh no, that is not taxable. And both of those answers cannot be used to defend yourself in an audit. So imagine having to do tax research on everything that it is that you sell. When a customer calls and says, I don't understand this bill. Why did you tax me the way you did? What do you do to research that answer? How do you do all of these registrations and get your building permits? And I think of permits and licenses much broader than just a building permit or a sales tax permit or a business license. For field service companies, there's a whole bunch of licenses that have to be managed. My husband ran an HVAC company for twenty plus years in the Northern Virginia area, and they have master plumber, heating, refrigeration licenses, and all of these things have to be renewed. And I remember asking like, how do you keep track of all of these folks that are out there and whose licenses are going to expire? And he's like, oh, we have that at spreadsheets. And I was like, great, you're going to get a call from this orange company, Avalara. So managing licenses, think much broader than just a business license, but all of the licenses for your technicians and for your fleet of vehicles. How do you maintain that? Navigating nexus on where you should be registered and collecting tax, filing those tax returns. Let's talk about filing the tax returns for a second. And I think this is kind of fascinating and sad all at the same time. Sales tax, we call it an indirect tax, right? The states are saying, Hey, I need you to go out there on our behalf and collect this tax. And once you've collected it, then you need to give it to me. You would think they would make it really easy for you to collect the tax and then report it. But all of these definitions have made it really hard. It's kind of like a catch-twenty two, where the states say, go out there and collect it on our behalf, but we're going to make it as hard as humanly possible. And then when you do it wrong, we're going to penalize you for doing it wrong because we didn't make it easy for you. So, thought of sales tax being easy is not the super sexy tax like income tax. It is actually pretty complex and can leave you with a whole bunch of problems with the jurisdictions. So let's talk about the five steps to managing sales tax. One of the most important pieces is knowing where you must register and collect that tax. So there's nexus studies, right? Based on your business, what it is that you do, do you drive trucks in, do you have inventory places. Avalara can help you with a nexus study. But that is really the baseline. Where should I register and become a taxpayer? Once you have figured that out, you have to register and start to manage licenses. Avalara has a tool for that. We call it Avalara License Management. And that license management, again, I want you to think a little bit broader than just sales tax licenses and business licenses. Keep up with the registrations from your cars. All of those licenses your technicians have. Elevator permits, sign permits, anything that has to be renewed, there is something to help you with that to keep your business in compliance. So now you have registered, you have got your business license, you know where you should be registered and filing, now you have to calculate the tax. And there is the hard part what is taxable in each jurisdiction? That's where Avalara AvaTax comes in. And we're gonna see that here shortly. We're gonna see that in action. But that is really the heart of everything. This does the calculations for you. You don't have to know how it's taxed in every single state and jurisdiction across the world. Avalara does that. You do not have to keep up with the tax rates. Avalara does that. So back in the day when I was in industry, we had a group of twelve people that would contact the hotels. Hey, by the way, the tax rate's changing. The taxability of this changed. There's a new tax rate. That all goes away and you don't have to manage that when you use Avalara AvaTax. Next, we've got this exemption certificate. Remember, there's a good group of people that says managing these exemptions and storing them and finding them is complicated. That's where our ECM, our exemption certificate management solution comes into play. Imagine you don't have to go to a filing cabinet and find an exemption certificate. We've got it stored in a super smart filing cabinet. While we can store those exemption certificates, we use the data on those certificates to impact the tax calculation, that Avalara ABBA tax engine. So those two things work together. And then lastly, we've got the returns piece. You've done a great job of registering. You've done a great job of calculating tax and keeping up with those exemption certificates, managing consumer use tax that we haven't talked about on here. Now I've got to do something with all this tax that I've collected. You can't keep it. That's the F word we don't say. And that can actually put your owners in true jeopardy because this tax that's being collected is not yours. You've collected it on behalf of government agencies. So it has to be reported. And that's where the returns piece comes in. We take all of this transactional data that's been processed and passed over to us, We put it on tax returns. Think of it kind of like payroll, where you send off to a payroll company all of your information about people's time and their salary and it calculates how much you owe. They say, Here is how much payroll is for the period. You send them one dollar amount and they issue the paychecks to the employees. That is the same concept. We have got all of this transactional information in our database. You have told us, I need you to file in Virginia every month, in Maryland quarterly, in Pennsylvania annually. We take all of this transactional data and we put it onto the tax returns. You give us one dollar amount and we issue the payments to all the jurisdictions and file the returns with the jurisdictions as well. But I don't want you to hear it just for me. I want you to see it in action with Sampro. So I'm gonna pass this off to Grace, and she's gonna show you the magic of Sampro and Avalara at work. Excellent. Thank you for that introduction, Christine. And good morning or good afternoon, depending on where you are in the country. I'm gonna turn on my screen share. And waiting for it to there we go. We got it registered here on the stage. So I wanna take some of those concepts Christine mentioned and show you it in action relative to the SAMPro database. So where we're starting here, I'm on our beautiful registry table. Of course, there's a registry key for Avalara attack service. It'll be under sys Avalara. You don't have to worry about taking notes or or capturing any of these details as the Databasics team would help you through your registry setup on implementation. But showing you under the hood here for SIS Avalara, the first sixteen rows would be common for any install. So we would want these registry keys in terms of the values. Those will be unique relative to your instance. And then I wanna show here, in this particular instance, from row seventeen down, you have the ability to hard code your your sales tax GL, your liability account there, by state. So not not required, but it is an option that's available to you. Again, the common registries for any Avalara install are rows sixteen and up here. When we think about billing, we start with billing a service compute job. You will have a consult with Avalara, and you'll determine which tax codes are appropriate for your lines of work. And we're gonna translate that into Sampro by baking those tax codes into our job cost categories. Again, this is for service compute or work order based billing. So here I have a list of job cost categories. If we drill into a record, you'll see we have a dedicated field to store the Avalara tax code. Now this is one of those fields where you have the option to right click, you'll see the menu to customize field, and that'll bring you to our custom field viewer. We'll leave the label alone. The label is pretty intuitive. I think a user would read that and know what it's intended for. But what you want to customize would be your list of available values here in the child pane. And why would we do this? This is a best practice recommendation so that you don't end up entering gobbledygook into that field or a nonsensical tax code that's not going to truly resolve or map back to Avalara. So again, you will consult with Avalara, determine which tax codes are applicable for your lines of work, and you will end up with a finite list of codes that you'd want to use there. So establish them in the customized field. Now we can come back and double click in that field that we've customized, and we can select the appropriate value. Again, no no accidentally boogering the tax code because I had to I was forced to select it from a list. All right, here I've got a freshly cloned job. Job in our world is a marriage between a client whom we bill and a site where we work, and it's a sales taxable job. And I'm going to use the Avalara service to populate the sales tax group. Now, where is it going to garner that from? At the site level. So here you see on display in the lower portion of my screen, the site address information. And just to the left of it, we have the special button, status set sales tax group. Excuse me. So when we click this button, it'll call out to the Avalara web service, and it'll write back a tax group into our job record. Now jumping ahead to drill into that tax group. If you're using the Avalara service, you'll notice that these display only fields will have some jargon in them. We have a little tag here. It was imported from the Avalara service. When was it last updated? And a group signature. Notice that the tax group is ID'd with a ZIP code. If this tax group already existed in the database and I went to set the sales tax group on the job, it would simply read it and re update it for any changes. When we'll see in the child portion, we have all our respective authorities that were applicable for this tax group and their respective rates. Alright. So for service compute jobs, we tuck that tax code into the job cost category. Progress invoice jobs are materially different. For those, we're gonna store that tax code under the billing item. So drilling into a billing item record here, and I'm parked on the user fields tab. Again, this is another one of those fields where you can right click, have the option to customize. In this case, I would customize the label. Here you see it says Avalara tax code. If I didn't customize that, it would simply read job billing item user one. So I've customized the label and the explicit set of values that we're allowed to select. So again double click in that field after you've customized it and select the appropriate tax code per billing item or industry term we're thinking schedule of values. Alright. Once you use the tax service to set up your sales tax group, here I wanna show you on the Avalara end of things what that transaction's going to look like. So under the Avalara web portal, transaction sub menu on our left, and I've got my transactions limited to just this month for easy visibility here. And the very first one listed is in a voided state. That was that call to the service to validate the the the sales tax group needed for the job. We drill into that transaction. What you're going to see here is essentially like a a phony hundred dollar charge across each of the tax codes that are present in your implementation. So for every one of those tax codes, we're doing a quick hundred dollar sanity check, if you will, compute the desired taxes, and then we're gonna throw away this transaction because, again, it it's not a real sale for a hundred dollars. It was just simply a a calculator test. So again, one row for every tax code that you have in your instance. And if we drill into one of these records, we'll see the tax code that it's attempting to test, and down lower, we'll see all the authorities that it was testing in that tax group. So apologies. It's cut off due to the real estate on my screen here, but, there were three authorities in this particular group. Alright. Now I've got an example of the service compute invoicing process here. We have a work order that's ready to bill. It's in an invoice ready state. And two ways to invoke the service, you can either run your billing compute worksheet where we predict what we're about to bill, or you can run the service compute function, act like you're you're about to truly generate your invoices. Either option will make a call to the service and write back the expected sales tax amount. So here I'm embarking on the service compute process as if I'm going to print and post my invoice. And note that I'm I'm doing a a one off in this example for illustrative purposes, but you absolutely can and will apply the Avalara service to a batch invoicing concept. You don't have to do your invoices one at a time. We can still handle batching. So we'll hit go, and as soon as I get to my checklist screen, we can already see that it's made that query to Avalara, and it's wrote back our our expected sales tax amount. So before I even get to the actual invoice preview, we've registered that dollar amount there. Alright. We'll click go, and we're proceeding with generating our invoice. And when you get to your invoice preview, you hit the print button, and we get the special prompt. Did the report print correctly, and is it ready to be posted? For for illustration here, my first pass at it, I said no. So I started to invoice, and then I bailed on the process, and I wanna show you what that looks like on Avalara's end. So back in the Avalara portal under our transactions menu, again, limiting my visibility to just this month, we see that invoice number and that it's currently in a document status of uncommitted. So, again, kind of a false start here. We started to invoice. We know we computed the expected tax amount, all things holding constant, but it's not a true sale. We didn't post it, so it's sitting in uncommitted state for Avalara, and that's expected. And here, just drilling down to the details, again, sitting in an uncommitted state. Alright. We're gonna run through our service compute process again. We'll hit the print invoice button. We get our service compute screen. I'm doing this as a one off, but it can be applied in a batch capacity. And we got our invoice image up. We hit print, and then that that special prompt, did the report print correctly, and is it ready to be posted? This time, I said yes. I wanna post this and lock this down. Alright. Here we're at the invoice master record, and what you can see in the top right, there's a display for the document status on the Avalara side. This isn't a stored value. You can't query this back out using SQL. This is a live read at what Avalara has on file for this document in terms of current status. So we have it in a state that's posted and, again, committed now. Previously, it was uncommitted, but now it's in a committed state on the Avalara end. Again, showing that it's posted. And in the child here, if we click on our tax history tab, we'll see one row for each authority that was contained in the sales tax group. So those tax history details, we'll post back to SAMPro as if you know, regardless of the service. Right? These are the tax details we capture when we post AR invoices, but the data was fed to us from the service. Alright. Back on the Avalara portal, again, same invoice number, same document number. We now see it in a committed state because we fully posted it. We took it all the way through the process. Let's take that same invoice and show you what it would look like if we did a a reversal. So inside of the invoice master record, we have a teeny tiny button here to do invoice reversals. This is my preference to launch it from this button if you're already at the screen. You can certainly browse to the invoice reversal screen outside of invoice master, and manually key in the invoice that you're looking to reverse, but I like to generate it from here. And what that buys me is, again, it's already gonna load up the explicit invoice number that I'm aiming to reverse. We've got our current active accounting period, the current date. Note, we give you a transaction description field. You can use this as a, you know, audit trail, breadcrumbs. Why did I reverse the invoice? Please, no special characters in this field. And also note with the Avalara service, we do not want to reuse invoice IDs. Okay? So once this gets to a voided state, which is where we're headed because we're gonna reverse it, that's the end of the road for this invoice number. When I go to rebill the work order, I would truly generate a new invoice number or document number for the Avalara side. Alright. At the top left, we're gonna hit go, and it's prompting us because this was billing against a work order. It's asking us, do we wanna put that work order status back into invoice ready? Always yes. Otherwise, you're you're setting yourself up for some unbilled costs that would have to get addressed later. So we wanna put that work order back into an invoice ready status. Of course, we can make changes or or modifications that required us to reverse it in the first place before we reprocess. Here's my invoice reversal posting report. We can see it undid the impact to AR, and it undid the impact to our sales tax liability because we reversed that invoice. And then back on our invoice master record, we're gonna see it in a state of reversed. And then you can see over to the right here, the the current document status as reported back by Avalara is now in a voided state. And here we are back on the Avalara portal, same document number. We've now moved it from uncommitted to committed to an ultimate voided, and that's where it's going to land. Again, we'll rebuild that work order. We'll we'll generate a fresh document number. One other status to harp on while we're here. Uncommitted means I started a transaction, but I didn't process it all the way through. Committed means it's valid. I processed it, posted it all the way through. Voided. Voided can be a reversal like we just saw, or voided can mean I made a call to set the sales tax group on the job record. And then the fourth document status is locked. So a few days into the following month, once everything is ready, we want Avalara to remit our sales tax filings for us. That's the point where these will become locked documents and no longer able to modify or make edits there. We want to lock down the past for referential integrity now that the report's been officially filed with the respective jurisdiction. All right. Again, it's in a status avoided because we reversed. So two more features I want to harp on before we toss it back for any questions and answers. So it's important to validate your site addresses with the Avalara integration, And the reason being is that if we cannot validate the site address, when you go to bill, it will throw you in error, and you will not be able to fully print, post your invoices while you're in this erred state. You need to address whatever whatever inconsistency it's it's stumbling on with that site address so that we can assign the appropriate tax group and move forward with printing and posting our invoices. So this is one of the prep items we would assign you is is is coming through your database to make sure site addresses are valid. And to illustrate the concept here on a one off-site, we have a special button to call the Avalara service and validate this address. Now, address is whole, it's intact, and I want to tell you the source of truth that Avalara will be using is USPS. So what's on file with USPS, unless the Avalara folks tell us different, that is what they're using as their source of truth for that validation. So if we hit this button and the address is copacetic, we get the message back, address is valid. I want to take you through an example where we intentionally boogered it, removed part of that street address, and this is the message you get when you have an invalid site address and you use the the check button. So we have here, Sampro secure communication error. Address cannot be geocoded, an exact street name match could not be found, and phonetically matching the street name resulted in either no matches or matches to more than one street name. Alright. And we're what you run into this issue thinking about job sites that are located in a strip mall or perhaps at the intersection of of two major roads. It's at West eighth and Broadway. Well, is the address really West eighth Street? Is it really Broadway? So in the event that you get in a tear here on the literal street verification, we have an out, and that would be to add the text of general delivery to street address two or street address three field. I wanna note here what we send up to the Avalara service is street address one, street address two, street address three, city, state, and ZIP. We do not send the contents of street address for. So anything you key in there is essentially disregarded. We don't pass that back up to the service. So we have a key code here of general delivery, and then we also want to enter a dash nine thousand nine hundred ninety nine on the zip code extension. These two pieces will help us bypass that literal street validation that we can't seem to get copacetic there with USPS. So, with that, we're going to go ahead and save our record with the two overrides, general delivery and the dash nine nine nine nine, and we're gonna test our address validation button again, and you'll see now we're rendering back addresses valid. Again, we got you close enough. We know the city. We know the first five of the ZIP. We were just bombing on the street. Alright, and the last piece, that's all well and good if you're in a particular site or you just have some onesie twosies that you want to validate. If you want to validate, let's say, en masse, we've got a site address validation report. Again, Databasics would install this if you if you partook in the Avalara, integration. And here's my report screen. You notice that I have various filters available. I also have a checkbox option at the top to only show me the bad addresses. Maybe I don't care about the good sites because they, quite frankly, they don't warrant my attention. I don't need to touch them. So you can limit your results to only show invalid addresses. And I'm filtered to the state of Delaware. Wide open, again, not limiting my results there other than state, and we'll hit go. And here's my report results. So I had three sites in this database that were tied to the state of Delaware, and I want to direct your attention to the far right hand side here. We have little Ys for yes, meaning it's valid, and little Ns for no, meaning it's not valid. So of my three sites here in Delaware, sites two and three are valid. The first one listed is not, and I can spot right away the culprit. We only have a partial street address here. We just simply have the numbers. We're missing the street name. So I wanna go back, make that record intact, and then retest my site address validation, whether it's via the report or via the button within the explicit site record to make sure that that we're validated there. Alright. So that's what I had to show for today. I want to turn it back over to our hosts. I think we're going to enter our question and answer round. Thank you. Thank you for showing that, Grace. That is just amazing to see that in action. And there's so many things to think about. Like we spend quite a bit of time talking about address validation and let me explain why we care so much about address validation. For me, there's kind of two pieces to it. One, if you are ever shipping anything to somebody and you ship it by FedEx and UPS, if they change an address, they charge you thirty dollars So validating and normalizing an address may help reduce any shipping costs that you have. But two, Avalara actually uses a street level address to assign a jurisdiction. This morning, I was walking through some new folks to Avalara about why we care about an address, and I brought up the city of Birmingham. And it is kind of crazy that there is little carve outs in Alabama that you would think are part of the city of Birmingham, but they are actually not. Maybe somebody special lives in those areas. So a city, state, and zip, and I use my old address in Georgia an awful lot. Suwanee, Georgia thirty thousand and twenty four is in three different counties with three different tax rates. But when you add the street level address, hence the address validation, Avalara says, Oh, that is this latitude and longitude. Let me put a pin on a map and see what jurisdictional boundary exists. So that address validation is super important for accurate tax calculations. And Grace had also talked about those taxability codes, those alphanumeric codes. That is kind of the magic and the secret sauce. Is the wizard behind the curtain. Avalara keeps a matrix, if you will, of all of those codes all across the world and we know how those codes are taxed. Here is the beauty of this: you associate what it is you are billing your customers to taxability codes. If you have to register in a new state because of this economic nexus concept, you don't have to do anything to figure out how to charge tax in those jurisdictions. On the Avalara side, you simply check a box and say, Now I am registered here, and all of the taxability and tax rates just get updated on the Avalara side. Let us talk about the Avalara tax compliance suite. We do have a tax research tool and I am going to totally age myself with this one. Back in the day, I used to have to go to the law library and pull out those black books that had onion skin paper, if anybody remembers what onion skin paper is. We have actually taken all of those pages from those binders and put them into our tax research tool, but put it in language that you and I can understand, not the legalese. So if you ever have a question or need to do some research, don't call the Department of Revenue because what answers you get from those folks may not be something that you can rely on. You can use this tax research tool and you have got the ability to ask a question of our attorneys. You can even look through the list of questions that other people have asked if they have allowed it to be shared and see if that fits what it is that you guys are looking for. Here is the tax research piece that I love. I used to spend so much time explaining to people why we tax them the way we did. The Avalara engine does the calculation, but it does not tell you the why. That is the tax research tool. When a customer calls and says, Why did you charge me tax? From that Avalara portal that Grace showed you, I do not know if you saw my little friend on the right hand side, Avi, our AI bot Avi. You can ask Avi, How is delivery surcharges taxed in the state of Maryland? And it will actually give you the answer to that and you can then share it to your customers. You can email that answer to your customers. So that tax research tool is just a fantastic tool to help with any questions that your customers may have or one off questions that you have got. Maybe you are going to buy some new equipment and you want to know how it is taxed. In my instance, in industry, we were going to buy a new airplane and I had to do research in a whole bunch of states to figure out where was the best place to hanger that airplane. We take all of that data and that is really what powers our exemption certificate tool and our tax determination engine and even our tax returns piece as well. We have got this exemption management tool that really helps on both the buy side and the sales side. This is going to help you collect those exemption certificates, make sure that they are on the right form, they are properly completed, etc. But it is storing them in what I call that super smart filing cabinet. I am storing those images and the data because when I go to that next piece, that tax determination engine, I use that data to impact the tax calculation. So that tax determination engine is going to look at it, again, from both the sales side and the purchase side. What sales tax do I need to charge? What consumer use tax do I need to charge myself as well? And then lastly, we take all of this information and it flows through to the tax returns so that we can file those with all the right jurisdictions as well. And we are using that tax research to say, hey, you get these discounts for filing on time. Here is the due date of those. All of that plays into our tax return piece as well. So to kind of give you a look of the hierarchy of products that we have, think about yourself in the middle of this. There is both the buy side and the sale side. And that's what Avalara is covering on both sides of that. So our core products are exemption certificates, our tax calculation engine, the tax return and reporting piece, and also the electronic invoicing and live reporting that's required outside the United States. And supporting all of those core products, we have got our licenses and registrations, that tax research tool that you can go to to ask questions. We can help you with this item classification of what it is that you are selling to those Avalara taxability codes. If you are selling anything across border, this is where you have got VAT, you have got land and cost, all kinds of things go into cross border that you may need some assistance with. And then we can also help, and now is the perfect time with ten ninety nines and w nines as we approach the end of January, ten ninety nines become a hot topic. But we also help with property tax as well. And then all of this is supported through our integrations, whether that's our standard prebuilt connections like Sampro, whether you need to get into a CRM, if you've got ecommerce, if you're selling through marketplaces, point of sale systems, any kind of third party billing systems, you have your own system and you want to use our API to be able to connect to the Avalara service. Lastly, we support all of that through a team of professional services that help you with the streamlined sales tax project, which we hadn't talked about yet. A risk assessment, where should I have been registered and what are my options for mitigation with that. We can also help with implementation, training on how to use the Avalara service, and then support as well. And to kinda give you an idea of where Avalara sits and how we do all of this, we've got Avalara. It's almost like the sun. It's the center of the universe. And we partner with folks from, ERP systems, from accounting platforms, accounting systems, consultants, system integrators to be able to provide all of these services to our customers. So I wanna leave this at the end for questions. Grace, I know we wanted to talk about the use tax piece of things. Do you wanna chat about that one for a second? Yes, absolutely. So current day, if you were to embark on an integration between Sandpro and Avalara, we're only sending up the sales taxable transaction data. We're working on finding a way to bridge the use tax activity so that such that you can get to the point of being able to use Avalara for filing both. So, still in development, but, it's it's very much an active thing on our end, and we're happy to share once that's available. So current day, sales tax only. We're working on the use tax piece. What about Canada? That's a great question. Maybe I'll invite John here to the stage. John personally does the Avalara implementations. John, are you aware of of, any existing clients that have sales in Canada or that were natively found you know, established in Canada? Oh, and you're muted. What he's saying is brilliant, though. We just can't hear him, but it's brilliant. Helps if I unmute myself, I guess. Actually, we've got a couple of, clients that do integrate with Avalara, and they do have a few customers in Canada, but they can't use use the Avalara tax service in Canada. Excellent. It does not work in Canada. Correct? Correct. Okay. And I don't know if that's a restriction with within Avalara or just with how the data has to be transmitted to Avalara with the Canadian provinces and zip codes? It probably has something to do with currency code is my guess. Yeah. So John and Grace, can you talk about what when we talk about the integration and implementing this integration, what do people have to think about as they prepare to implement Avalara with SAMpro? Yeah, great question. Obviously, the site address cleanup is number one. Otherwise, as you go to bill work for those sites, if it's not valid, again, you're going to get stopped in your tracks until addressed that. Thinking about the surface, again, it's applicable for sales taxable jobs. If you have clients that are exempt, we strongly recommend that you you follow the the recommendation from Christine and upload it on the Avalara portal side. On the SanPro side of the house, you could have that job marked as tax exempt. Either option will prevent the computation. Again, preferences that you've stored on the client level in the Avalara side but in tangent, we'd like to see the job marked tax exempt as far as the status goes. In preparation for this, you would end up having a consultation with Avalara to determine the taxability codes, those alphanumeric codes that we'd end up helping you set up in your database. So I would be prepared. Now this might be more of a question for Christine. What kind of questions would you have the client think about before they enter into that consultation? Oh, great question. I think it all comes down to those taxability codes. Those taxability codes are so important. But also what we're hearing an awful lot from customers is we don't know where we should be charging tax. They think of, oh, this is where we're located. They may go into other jurisdictions. So maybe a nexus study, that sales tax risk assessment may be a good thing too as part of that implementation, just so that you've got this, all right, here's where we are, here's what I know we need to do, now let's move forward. Certainly. Guys, this is amazing because you literally just asked every question I was about to ask. So you're kind of psych mind readers and actually we had a couple of questions from attendees, but you already answered those questions. So you kind of know what the audience wants. So really appreciate it. Think I see there's one more question. Can I answer this one real quick? Oh, what's the question? Yes. This one was what happens when there's a tax holiday? Oh, go for Tax holidays to me are fascinating. I don't know how people do this without automation. And think about like natural disasters happen in like the Florida, Louisiana, Texas coast. Those states usually have tax holidays so that people can prepare for hurricanes and they buy things like generators and flashlights and things like that. So states have these tax holidays. So how does that work with Avalara? And these taxability codes are the important piece of that because Avalara knows which taxability codes fall into those tax holidays. So then we look at different attributes of that transaction. What's the date of that transaction? What's the tax code that's being used? And we say, Oh, it's within this tax holiday period and it's this item, calculate zero tax and return it back to Sampro. So there's nothing that anybody has to do for it. Avalara is doing it all, we're the wizard behind the curtain looking at this and saying, these dates, these tax codes charge zero tax. Yeah, just to piggyback on that with acute support story, we have an existing client, mutual client, and they were billing and they thought something was wrong. Like, we're not getting taxes to compute back from Avalara. When we dug into it, we found that there was a legitimate tax holiday in that state. So, again, without automation, I don't know how clients can manage. So it was cute. You know, Avalara was smarter than the client in that that capacity. So that's a great question. Tax holidays, you don't have to set and forget anything. Avalara's got it managed. So I got a question for you because I'm super curious. What's the answer to our poll question? Christine, I was just about to get to We did not forget. I know I promised the answer here at the end. Everyone's been waiting for that answer. I'm going with Chuck Norris myself. And we didn't get any votes for it, but the correct answer was Robert De Niro. Wow. What are we gonna do with the consolation prize, Cheyenne? Oh, gee. Well, the consolation prize was smiles and the privilege of knowing that you know a lot about Martin Scorsese films. So I guess no one gets to have that today. Nobody writes. Well, everyone, we so appreciate you attending Christine, Grace, John, thank you so much for your expertise. I myself learned a lot. I'm sure all of our attendees did as well. This webinar will live on in perpetuity. It's going to be emailed to all of our attendees as well as be available on the SAMPro Databasics website. If you have any questions at all about what you heard today, if you have an interest in exploring more about this integration, please contact your account manager. They'll help you along and get you over to Avalara. And again, thank you everyone so much for attending. We really appreciate it and we're wishing everyone a great day. Thank you. Take care everybody. Bye everyone. Thank you everyone.