Finance transformations are speeding up. Leaders are under even greater pressure to modernize operations. Avalara’s solutions are infused with AI and automation that accelerates digital transformation in finance to support navigating the complexities of compliance across global tax jurisdictions. Built specifically for SAP, Avalara solutions give finance teams the power to take back time for strategic analysis, scenario building, and proactively protect the organization.

Scalable Tax Automation within SAP

Together, SAP and Avalara offer a modern and integrated approach to meeting the complex and strategic demands of enterprise tax. Avalara provides a clean core focused, cloud-based, scalable, global tax compliance solution built on SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP). Whether you’re leveraging SAP S/4HANA or SAP ERP Central Component (SAP ECC), Avalara’s award-winning integrations pull customer master data and tax data directly into SAP ERP to support omnichannel and international sales. Let’s look at how Avalara and SAP make taxes less taxing for enterprises. Endorsed SAP integrations include – SAP S/4HANA, SAP Business One, SAP ERP, SAP ECC, and SAP S/4HANA (Private Cloud). Finance professionals’ gain:

• Improved operational efficiency and accuracy with end-to-end compliance automation that minimizes errors and lost sales.
• Full-lifecycle tax coverage that lowers the cost and time associated with managing compliance. Including a cloud-first modular solution and managed services for VAT, GST, returns and exemption certificates.
• Connected data across business units and geographies, as well as legacy and custom enterprise resource planning systems.
• Reduced data storage and processing power in SAP. Avalara’s clean core cloud-first approach leverages SAP BTP to reduce the amount of custom code required to handle compliance and executes tax calculations.

Powered with AI

Businesses are driving business efficiency using artificial intelligence. Finance and tax are using it to advance research, calculate tax, simplify reporting and detect anomalies that signal risk. Avalara uses machine learning to assist in the validation of exemption certificates and Avi for Tax Research, which is a conversational, AI-powered agent that helps users get accurate answers to tax questions. Trained on trusted Avalara compliance content libraries, the assistant understands complex tax language. Whether finance teams are preparing for U.S. sales tax audits or trying to interpret new regulations Avi, provides contextual responses to queries.

Why it Matters in Finance

Embedding Avalara into SAP environments gives finance teams more control. Close times shrink by eliminating manual reconciliations for discrepancies between sales, tax, and general ledger data.  Avalara automates reconciliation, validation and filing across 45+ countries. The complexity of managing global tax is reduced. Finance teams have confidence in their numbers with real-time country-specific tax determination for Sales & Use, VAT, and GST. They can also generate submission-ready returns for Intrastat ensuring compliance with EU trade regulations, EC Sales List for intra-EU transactions, and SAF-T reporting for digital audits. The future of AI in finance and tax compliance, according to Avalara, is bright. So often, sales tax stands out as a quick win with automation and AI. It is, but there are other areas of tax that can benefit. Avalara is using AI and automation to transform how tax and finance professionals work in other areas too:

• AI-powered global tariff classification and duty estimation, trained on billions of trade data points for greater accuracy,

• Automated e-invoicing and exemption certificate management, leveraging machine learning to streamline workflows
• Real-time tax code prediction and checkout validation, enhancing accuracy and reducing risk at the point of sale
• End-to-end automation of W‑9 and 1099 processes, simplifying compliance and saving time
• Region-specific compliance tools, built to address the complexities of global jurisdictions, including LATAM and APAC

 What this Means for SAPinsiders

• Shorten close cycles and improve the accuracy and timeliness of financial reporting with Avalara integrated with SAP.
• Spend less time preparing compliance reports with data populated directly from SAP, then validated and formatted for submission.
• Gain more confidence in tax accruals at period-end by increasing tax accuracy, minimizing errors, and making fewer adjustments with jurisdiction-specific tax rules that calculate in real-time.