Avalara, Inc. (NYSE: AVLR), a leading provider of cloud-based tax compliance automation for businesses of all sizes, today announced a new partnership with Xero, the global small business platform, that will provide accountants, bookkeepers, and small businesses with a new sales tax automation solution. The new partnership will bring advanced sales tax workflows and management directly into the Xero platform, enabling advisors and business owners to automate sales tax calculations, reporting, and filing.

Simplifying sales tax compliance for accountants and small businesses

With more than 13,000 sales and use tax jurisdictions in the U.S., managing and reporting sales tax can be a complex and resource-intensive burden for small business owners. Recent research found that small businesses with up to five employees spend an average of 163 hours or $17,672 each month ons ales tax compliance.  

The partnership will allow Avalara and Xero to build an integration solution that automates the sales tax compliance journey from within the Xero platform, which allows accountants and small businesses to more easily manage sales tax calculation and reporting. Avalara’s expansive tax content database and sales tax calculation engine improves the accuracy and streamlines the management of ever-changing taxability rules and rates.Meanwhile, Xero provides the ability to apply the correct tax treatment to invoices and simple, state-based reporting.

"We know people don’t start their small business to be buried in tricky admin. Our new partnership with the experts at Avalara, we can automate compliance work and give small businesses and their advisors a simple, efficient, and beautiful experience to meet their tax obligations so they can focus on growing their business,” said Anna Curzon, chief product officer at Xero.  

Looking forward, accountants and businesses will benefit from additional sales tax functionality from across Avalara's suite of products, including e-filing options and more detailed reporting tools.

“Sales tax continues to change and become more complex, especially for small businesses. We want to make it as easy as possible for these businesses to have access to automated solutions so they can focus on running their business,” said Sanjay Parthasarathy, chief product officer at Avalara. “By partnering with Xero, we are able to inject Avalara’s tax compliance expertise and technology directly into a leading global accounting platform for a convenient way for businesses to manage sales tax. This partnership will also support accountants by automating the management of changing tax rates and rules, and providing validated data to process returns for clients.”

This partnership with Xero illustrates Avalara’s commitment to embedding compliance into experiences for our partners. Earlier this year, Avalara announced new tools and APIs to expand opportunities for partners to build compliance integrations and functions.

The partnership was announced at Xerocon New Orleans, where Avalara and Xero provided attendees the first opportunity to sign up for closed-beta trials, which will be available next year to a limited number of users