Why are so many organizations leveraging the Streamlined Sales Tax (SST) Model 1 program to help reduce the cost, effort and risk associated with sales tax compliance? SST offers a path to manageable, affordable and accurate compliance through technology providers that have been rigorously tested and certified by the 24 SST member states.

Sovos is one of four certified service providers (CSPs) certified by the SST Governing Board, offering clients completely accurate sales tax rates and simplified filing through our Model 1 program. We help businesses comply with each jurisdiction’s sales tax laws, allowing organizations to outsource most CSP compliance responsibilities.

The Model 1 program can be greatly beneficial to taxpayers who do not have people or property in states, but may have registered (or who need to register) under the economic nexus requirements that have cropped up across the U.S. over the last several years. With Sovos as your CSP, economic nexus taxpayers are fully supported in their sales tax function all the way through filing and remittance. It is done in a cost-effective way that limits your audit exposure.

Furthermore, Sovos would be responsible for monitoring rate and rule changes, accounting for those changes before they become effective, calculating tax correctly on your sales and timely filing and remitting.

Sovos provides direct support to the product taxability mapping exercise, assigning each seller a dedicated Managed Services tax preparer and we prioritize any technical support questions. Additionally, when audits do arise, Sovos serves as the main point of contact and takes much of the responsibility for potential penalties.

Specifically, Sovos products and services include the following:

Global Tax Determination – Our cloud solution has always-on capabilities, empowering your business with real-time tax calculations.
Sovos Filing – Streamline your filing responsibilities, regardless of the size of your business, with our intuitive software tools.
Filing Managed Services – Remove the sales tax filing burden by outsourcing to our experts who are knowledgeable on the latest filing requirements and form changes.

Sovos’ CertManager exemption certificate tools are also a critical tool for our Model 1 customers working with exempt customers. CertManager allows businesses to store and validate exemption certificates in real time, with the ability to fully automate the process through the Sovos Managed Services team.

Through the Sovos’ Model 1 program, your CSP would be responsible for monitoring rate and rule changes, accounting for those changes before they become effective, calculating tax correctly on your sales, and for timely filing and remitting. The cost is mainly absorbed by compensation Sovos receives directly from the states, helping to keep compliance affordable.

The digitization and increasing complexity of sales and use tax has necessitated that most organizations rethink their approach to sales tax and compliance management. Rapidly changing regulatory guidelines and tax laws have made manual processes obsolete and have greatly increased the burden on internal tax teams to get things right.

For many, managing this new level of sales tax complexity means integrating tax with their SAP solutions in order centralize operations and create efficiencies of scale. Already a platform fixture for most companies, SAP solutions allow companies to build a tax first structure that ensures that all regulatory changes are accounted for and updated automatically. This greatly enhances defenses against audits and resulting financial penalties and damage to company reputation.

Sovos helps organizations using SAP solutions drive their digital transformation and centralization initiatives forward. With more than 20 years of SAP experience and hundreds of SAP customers, Sovos has certified integrations for ECC and all S/4HANA deployment models (premise, private cloud and public cloud). Sovos’ Global Tax Determination solution has also achieved SAP certification as integrated with SAP S/4HANA® Cloud, as part of the “Co-Innovated with SAP” program. 

Centralizing sales tax in the cloud with Sovos ensures that clients always have the most up-to-date rates and rules. You also have the flexibility to leverage our SAP certified adapters and/or our simple API connections to calculate tax accurately in numerous ways, based on your own unique mix of technologies and business processes.

In addition, clients can realize the benefits of a fully integrated exemption certificate management solution. This allows you to easily capture, consolidate and manage all customer exemptions as part of an integrated workflow. Save time and improve accuracy, ensuring the presence of a current/accurate certificate drives an exemption in the tax engine.

Finally, when it comes to sales tax, the ability to take all transaction data and correctly report it is critical. Sovos’ reporting feature enhances visibility to manage all associated return data and streamline the filing process, with the capability to submit returns electronically where available. 

Remember, when integrating new SAP solutions, it’s important to consider tax early in the process. This will help to ensure that work doesn’t have to be repeated or work arounds created and both tax and IT save valuable time and resources and ensure alignment between the two groups.

With Sovos and SAP, businesses can face the future of sales and use tax with confidence. Watch our video and then connect with our experts for more information on how Sovos can help you solve your sales tax management issues.

Sales tax continues to grow in complexity which has expanded its organizational impact beyond the purview of just tax and finance departments. To effectively manage sales tax obligations in this new era of modern tax requires a partnership between IT and tax to ensure the proper systems and technology is in place to account for the multitude of regulatory changes taking place on a near daily basis. In this video, we explain how an effective sales tax solution should account for the nuances of your individual business and how it should seamlessly integrate with your existing technology.

Ensuring that your business is compliant with all state, county and local sales tax ordinances and nexus laws is not a nice to have, it’s an essential part of operating a successful business to lower your financial risk and potential for audits and damage to company reputation.

There are a number of tax software products that claim to make compliance easier, but you need to understand how adding new technology to your ecosystem will impact day to day operations. If new software is making life harder or adversely impacting other areas of the business, you have not succeeded in solving your sales tax management problem.

Many sales tax software implementations fail to meet the desired result because they don’t account for the unique challenges of your business. An out of the box, one size fits all sales tax solution sounds great in theory, but if it doesn’t address the challenges your are trying to solve it’s just another layer of IT complexity that needs to be managed. 

If you are currently considering a tax software solution to help alleviate your compliance burden, here are three things to consider. 

First, no two organizations are exactly alike, and all have their own unique problems and challenges, especially when it comes to tax compliance. Your solution should have a plan to account for these.

Two, how will your new tax software integrate with your existing architecture. You are looking to solve a specific set of sales tax compliance problems, not restructure your entire technology platform in the process.

Third, the end goal it to reduce the risk of audit and financial penalty by ensuring accuracy in your sales tax process. Don’t be distracted by other, non-essential features.

At Sovos, we will take the time to understand the nuances of your business and provide solutions uniquely qualified to solve your most pressing tax compliance issues.

We offer solutions and services with the flexibility to meet your most essential sales tax compliance needs and our hands-on approach ensures that you experience the benefits of our solutions quicker, with less time and resources required during the implementation phase.

Cloud solutions provide on-demand computing that don’t require active management by the user. However, assuming that all clouds are created equal is a mistake that will cost your business. If you are ready to solve your sales tax issues by harnessing the power of the cloud, be sure to understand the four critical pillars of cloud performance. These represent the difference between a complete solution and just another empty promise.

Availability

Your cloud solution isn’t valuable if it isn’t available. Sovos’ cloud platform operates in a robust, purpose-built data center, with a second, equally equipped data center on hot standby, which means planned maintenance is conducted without impact to your response time or uptime and the rare occurrence of unplanned failover can be executed within minutes. Sovos is committed to continued investment in the future of the cloud. If there is a better cloud to be built, Sovos will lead the way.

Scalability

The ability of your cloud to expand and grow along with your business should be your primary consideration. If your growth is inhibited by the capacity of your current cloud solution to keep pace, you are doing yourself a disservice. We ensure consistently quick response times to calculation requests, even in the most demanding time periods and business conditions. Our Global Tax Determination Cloud scales horizontally to handle unlimited transaction volume.

Flexibility

Your cloud needs to adapt to the demands of your business, not the other way around. We deliver certified integrations, modern APIs, batch processing and localized calculation options all to make your life easier. Sovos is the team and technology you can count on to ensure future success. We’ve been there before, and we deliver.

Security

Your cloud contains your most sensitive company data. You need to ensure that it is always protected. Our baseline security measures include: SSAE 16 audited data center utilization; comprehensive business continuity and disaster recovery plans and advanced encryption technology ensuring data security from transmission to encryption within the Sovos Intelligent Compliance Cloud environment.

As you can see, there is more to having an effective cloud-based tax solution than just selecting a cloud vendor. There are major differences in the options available on the market and it pays to do your research ahead of time. If not, you will be paying later, and that cost is far more expensive.

Moving tax to the cloud is the right call, just make sure you select a partner that can meet the demands of your organization. Make sure you talk to Sovos.