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Domain: taxware.com

Stories and comments across the archive that link to taxware.com.

Comments · 7

  1. Re:NOOOOOOO by The+Snowman · · Score: 1 · on Internet Sales Tax Vote This Week In US Senate

    Why should somebody in another state have to keep track of the tax laws in every municipality in every state in the country?

    They don't need to, this problem has already been solved:

    I have customers that use these vendors for taxes as well. The software I work on at my day job integrates quite nicely with these:

  2. Re:Free startup idea by chrisback · · Score: 1 · on U.S. Ecommerce To Be Broadly Taxed?

    And then get in line behind these guys, who have evidently seen this coming for a while.

    Taxware

  3. If it does, buy stock in these companies by shodson · · Score: 2, Interesting · on U.S. Ecommerce To Be Broadly Taxed?

    First Data Corp, which owns Taxware and handles taxation in multiple states and coutines nicely, even in jurisdictions that have different tax rates within the same zip code.

    The other big e-commerce tax product is Vertex which has a bigger Fortune 500 footprint, but they are not publicly traded nor are they owned by a publicly traded company. Good acquisition target.

  4. Re:How Hard 2 Program ... Really? by fkicker · · Score: 1 · on Court: Borders Web Ops Must Remit CA Sales Taxes
    Somebody, somewhere, must be making good money for maintaining a database of local sales taxes.
    http://www.taxware.com/ sells a product that will compute sales tax for the US and Canada. Entry level packages start around 50K(USD).

    Taxware doesn't really solve the hard problems. You are still required to correctly classify all your products for each tax jurisdiction. For example in Iowa, where I used to live, food is tax exempt, but candy is not. Twix bars are tax free, but Snickers and Reese's are taxable. Carmel apples are tax exempt, but chocolate covered raisins are taxed. I'll leave caramel coated pop-corn with nuts as an exercise for the reader (exempt).

    Taxware also doesn't offer any sort of remittance services. The internet merchant is still required to register and remit sales tax separately to each sales tax jurisdiction. For small merchants, this probably will exceed the cost of the sales tax collected.

    And, the biggest problem is that when state coffers run low state auditors love to shake down out-of-state businesses. My father-in-law gets hit by the State of California about every five years because his company does construction work in the state. No matter how well he keeps his books, they always hit him for about 10K.
  5. Re:Sales tax NOT regressive by eric_brissette · · Score: 1 · on Tracking Your Taxes

    Yes, the company I used to work for publishes a top ten list ever year of interesting/quirky/strange Sales Tax laws.

    Here is last year's:
    http://www.taxware.com/taxware_newsroom/2004%20PR/ TaxLaws_April04.htm

  6. Re:I don't think that's the problem... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0 · on Where Is The Plug-and-Play Linux Office System?

    Just an FYI, as an employee of a tax software company, Taxware (guess who I work for) will compile against any operating system that has an ANSI C compiler, and isn't terrifically expensive.

  7. The part that really sucks... by pjrc · · Score: 5, Interesting · on State Coalition Approves Internet Sales Tax Plan
    ...is this little bit:

    Under the states' plan, online sellers would be required to purchase approved software to compute the appropriate state and local taxes or to certify with the state any in-house calculation systems already in place. E-tailers could choose to outsource tax collection to a certified third-party under the states' plan.

    My little website is just one of thousands of tiny little businesses that are run part-time, or just barely pay the bills for one person to run it.

    It's absolutely unbelievable what a lot of companies charge for "e-commerce" software. How likely is this to be a $49.95 turbo-tax package? Nope, it'll be targeted at businesses and a few blood-sucking companies will see this as a big opportunity to rake in the dollars from every on-line merchant. We've seen lots of this mega-expensive software, and we manage to get by and make customers happy without any of it. It's unheard of to be _required_ by law to purchase some particular (extreemly expensive) software. And with some special gov't appoval/certification process, you can be sure it'll be plenty expensive...

    But for the little guys (like me), that money just isn't there. We can't spend thousands on software, or just about anything else for that matter. It looks like the company these states are working with is Taxware. Go visit their site and take a wild guess at what they're going to charge for this sort of software. It ain't gonna be cheap.

    The fact is that there are many thousands of very small on-line merchants. VERY small. Filing 45 tax returns is going to suck. Paying for expensive software, or consulting fees to some "approved" company will only add injury to the insult. Our accounting software budget includes a new version of Quickbooks for next year. That's about all we can afford software-wise.

    And it goes against all other tax paying practice to require specific approved software. You don't need special software from a specific "approved" vendor to file taxes. You do need to know how to do it, of course. My partner is a CPA and she knows ordinary sales tax very well (even though we live in Oregon where there is no sales tax). Why should we be held hostage to purchasing special software? Why does it need to be from specially approved vendors?

    If the tax can't be paid by a company with an ordinary CPA, and some special software is required, and that software is so special that vendors need to be certified by some special approval process, they certain't haven't made great strides towards making this a simple enough process. Special software isn't required for paying normal taxes, and requiring a special certification process for tax calculation software is totally unheard of. It reaks of a back-room deal between GovOne (the makers taxware) and these states... if some complicated certification process is required for anyone else trying to enter the market for this new software that every on-line merchant is compelled to buy, guess what the prices will be in the first year when Taxware is the only product available and everyone is REQUIRED to buy it?

    Well, enough ranting for one day. Maybe it won't be so bad. I'm just in a bad mood because a customer refused to pay the tax/duty on a package we shipped to the UK (and now we need to do something about it, and all the options suck....)