With over 58,000 U.S. cities and counties, each with their own tax rules and regulations, sales tax compliance is labor-intensive, complicated, and costly for companies who do business across state lines. This report focuses on one aspect of the compliance problem: the requirements around monitoring the ever-changing sales and use tax rates across jurisdictions.  Companies can deploy easily-accessible, quickly implemented, and affordable third-party sales and use tax rate tables as an effective tool for satisfying critical business requirements for this tedious part of the compliance process. Based on extensive experience in the field of sales and use tax consulting, this report examines how the use of third-party tax rate tables can measurably improve the tax compliance process by reducing the burden and risk involved.

Although many people believe that services are exempt from sales or use tax; in reality, only a few states exempt all services. On the other hand, only a few states actually tax all or almost all services,consistent with the imposition of their gross receipt tax, or based on the underlying presumption of taxability. When determining taxability of services, the biggest compliance challenge for most businesses is dealing with the majority of states that fall somewhere between the two extremes.

The balanced perspective that the $COPE Mind Set facilitates results in “client centric” behaviors. For example, the client centric practitioner, with more skills and tools at their disposal, would not be afraid to ask more questions and, at a minimum, help the client connect with an HR professional. More likely, given their advanced training, they would dig deeper to help the client determine the underlying causes of their problem. They might assist with exit interviews, offer behavioral assessments, or facilitate team building exercises.

With the introduction of web-based solutions, businesses have more practical options to choose from than ever before. By following a few guidelines, you can easily navigate through the options to find the right solution for your business.

In this study, businesses looking for an accounting system were asked to name the top ten criteria they used to select an accounting software package.  The responses were ranked in order of importance.