The Future of Tax Compliance for Your WooCommerce Clients

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We had a conversation with Prashant Rana from Avalara as he shared insights for builders about keeping their clients tax compliance and, even themselves. As far as what the future holds, here are some thoughts from Prashant.

Paying attention to tax compliance moving forward with your clients

So with e-commerce there are lots of trends to stay abreast of. Things like returns are starting to come in the forefront. Similarly, checkout processes are getting a little bit more simple on the front end but complicated on the back end, especially models like buy now, pay later coming into the picture where you are having multiple payments that will go through and you have to split taxes across all of them. You have to know how to disperse all that. And then that goes into your reporting and filing.

Those kind of things are going to come up as challenges and when mixing both of them. Ifsomebody bought it on buy now, pay later, paid two installments, and by that time, returned it back again, how does your client handle that? You can see the complexity that can quickly come up there. So those are the kind of things that we are keeping an eye out for as we go through.

Automation is big and continues to be so

Automation will be big. At Avalara, we are quite automated already, so most of our regulations allow for just plug in play and clients can be rest assured that it's being taken care of. But again, we are actively seeking feedback from our partners. Partners like WooCommerce and the developer community are valuable to us and their feedback is critical. They're coming back to us with these hooks that we need. That's what we want to build in. That's how we ended up building our plugin and we are providing more and more customizable features so that you can do all those kind of things, like for example, filtering which reports need to go into AvaTax for example.

That is something that we brought in, and you can code it rather than being tied to a pre-built extension. So both these aspects are being looked towards, and we see those trends across the board.

Headless

The other area that I'm seeing is headless commerce, which is coming up a lot. And because everyone wants to customize their experience, have a control on their tech stack, their tech spend overall. So supporting those kind of partnerships is also going to be essential as we go forward. These are key elements that are on the horizon.

Listen to Prashant's full story here.