Choosing a Qualified Sales Tax Consultant

Not all sales tax consultants can provide tax solutions for your sales & use taxes. Choosing the best and qualified consultant can save you the money, time and headache. This will help to free up your staff’s time so that they could focus on the important business activities. Following are the main factors which should be considered in filing the sales tax returns and choosing a sales tax service provider:

Business Plan:
First of all, you need to look at your business plan and understand the current status of your business. The business plan helps you to make the best suited plan by which your business could grow rapidly. Your business plan should be drafted by targeting your geographical market, products and services, distribution methods as well as marketing strategies.

Exposure of Sales Tax Audit:
There are costs in running a business to meet certain sales tax compliance, such as, collecting sales tax, and remitting it timely to the state and local governments. There are 50 states plus a district (D.C) each having its own set of sales tax laws and regulations written by law makers to make them difficult to understand. You have to interpret and apply these rules and regulations on the products sold and services provided by you. Mistakes can lead to under collection of tax and erode your profit. To complicate the issue furthermore, there are exemptions allowed by state and local governments on certain products or services, and documenting these exempt sales required good knowledge of what exemptions are allowed. Accepting an invalid exemption certificate certainly put you at risks in the audit. For this, the professional sales and use tax consultants at StatesSalesTax can help or assist you.

Choose an Automated System:
There are automated systems especially designed for handling the fast pace of change that drive sales tax compliance. The following process can be automated to file your sales tax return without any hassle:

Tax Rate Lookup: Rate change is very common and happens frequently nowadays. It can be obtained from state website published by the Department of Revenue. You may also subscribe to the sales tax rate lookup services provided by sales tax software companies or from StatesSalesTax.

Exemption Tracking & Taxability Rules: If you want to calculate your sales tax accurately, automated solutions will give you administrative tools that help to setup taxability rules in an easy and convenient way. These rules will also be applied automatically in every calculation based on each jurisdiction’s sales tax rules.

Report Preparation and Filing: This is one of the most important things in choosing an automated system for filing your sales tax return. You can also outsource these tasks to third party professional sales tax consultants like StatesSalesTax which has been providing sales tax consulting services, sales tax compliance, sales tax refund and recovery, and reverse sales tax audit defense to small and mid-sized businesses.