Avalara (NYSE: AVLR), a leading provider of tax compliance automation software for businesses of all sizes, today announced a new low-code studio to help developers easily build integrations between Avalara’s compliance platform and business applications, and two new APIs for sales tax returns and e-invoicing. Embedding compliance functions using APIs allows Avalara partners to serve their customers more holistically within the software they already use.
Avalara is expanding opportunities for partners to build compliance integrations and experiences. To offer flexibility and control to developers, Avalara is pursuing a headless compliance approach that decouples the front-end presentation layer of a compliance experience from the back-end compliance functionality. With new and future APIs for compliance, software developers can more quickly and easily build complete compliance workflows into business applications.
Avalara introduces low-code tools for developers
Avalara helps businesses simplify and automate tax compliance requirements. The company has done so by delivering Avalara Compliance Cloud applications to end users through more than 1,200 signed partner integrations into every type of business system, from ERPs and point-of-sale systems to ecommerce and marketplace platforms. Developers make the seamless integration of compliance into these applications a reality, building and maintaining integrations for the flow of data between systems that manage transactions and finance, and Avalara’s platform.
To improve the process of creating and maintaining integrations for partners, Avalara Integration Studio — a low-code platform for integration development — provides simple, customized workflows that developers can follow to build specific functions. Integration Studio both simplifies the complexity around understanding tax context and Avalara APIs, and allows nontechnical teams to more easily assist in the development of integrations.
“Developers are critical partners to Avalara. We want to make it as easy as possible for developers to build integrations, compliance experiences, and new compliance applications using the innovation and expertise from Avalara,” said Sanjay Parthasarathy, chief product officer at Avalara. “The capabilities announced today are the next step in our journey of learning from, working with, and supporting the developer community.”
Avalara announces new APIs
- Avalara’s e-Invoicing API will allow partners to offer their customers the ability to trigger and manage e-invoicing workflows from within their application.
- Avalara’s Returns API will allow partners to embed tax return workflows for their customers natively within their application.
Avalara’s new offerings extend the company’s API portfolio beyond tax calculation and compliance document management. This preview release of returns and e-invoicing APIs is an important step for Avalara to solicit input and feedback from the developer and partner community prior to commercial release. Early partnership and collaboration with these communities will inform prioritization and development of future compliance API development.
E-invoicing and associated live reporting requirements facilitate the exchange of transactions and related tax information, between businesses and governments in or near real time. More than 60 countries rely on or have announced the intent to move to an e-invoicing system for compliance, whereby businesses must use specific formats and/or validate transactions with governments. Avalara’s e-Invoicing API will enable partners to automate their customers’ e-invoicing obligations within the partners’ platforms. Partners can provide their customers with an e-invoicing offering that meets leading market standards, like PEPPOL BIS 3.0, as well as country-specific standards such as Portuguese eSPap, German ZUGFeRD, and Saudi Arabia’s Fatoorah.
Sales tax returns are an essential part of tax compliance and can be costly and time-consuming for businesses. Today, Avalara helps prepare and file returns for customers using transactional data in their business applications. Because of the matrix of state and local returns rules and deadlines, businesses are preparing and filing returns on a recurring, regular basis, requiring near-constant review and interaction with return preparation tools. Avalara’s Returns API will enable partners to present sales tax return flows for their customers natively in their business applications, making it convenient and simple for customers to engage throughout the returns filing process. This includes activities such as reviewing tax liabilities, viewing and approving pr-populated tax return forms, and submitting forms for filing via Avalara.
Avalara has many resources for developers available today, including the Avalara Developer Portal, Avalara Developer blog, and Avalara NEXT, an event for developers responsible for building global tax compliance into commerce and business operations.
