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How Poor Processes for Managing Exemption Certificates Creates Negative Customer Experiences
Introduction
Tax exempt transaction compliance is a much overlooked area of business that can damage or enhance the customers opinion of your company. When you dont manage your tax exempt customers properly, not only does your customer service suffer but you can also incur significant hidden costs.
We all know that customers are the sole reason why there are businesses and why businesses stay in business. This is why businesses are constantly searching for ways to improve service to customers, retain existing customers and thereby increase profits. Rightfully so, most businesses focus on the traditional areas like product mix, pricing, promotion and training. However, there is one area nearly all businesses overlook and that is the customer experience of sales tax exempt customers. To be exempt from sales tax, these customers must not only belong to a certain organization classification determined by taxing authorities, but are also required to have the proper documentation, called an exemption certificate, that proves they are exempt from paying sale tax. Sounds fairly simple. Unfortunately, it is anything but simple and a poor process for handling exempt customers can be a source of frustration for these customers and that can affect customer retention and eventually profits. It is complex due to the need to keep abreast of the hundreds of constantly changing exemptions in the hundreds of jurisdictions across the country. Inaccurately collecting and managing this exemption data by employees and within your internal systems (or not collecting it all) can have huge consequences downstream. Consequences can take the form of inaccurate billings, employees spending valuable time fixing errors like issuing tax refund checks or credits, poor customer service like held up orders, huge audit assessments and much more. This white paper will discuss how a poor process for managing exempt customers and exemption certificates impacts customer service, customer retention and profits and provides best practices for properly managing exemption certificates and creating a positive customer experience for your exempt customers.
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A well-defined, effective exemption certificate management process can help your company improve its relationships with exempt customers. To get a quick eye-opening insight on how a poor process can negatively affect customers, go to a community forum for a large company and search for forum topics on sales tax and youll see many exempt customers complaining about their exempt sales tax experience.
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QUICK FACT
Its difficult keeping current on exemption certificate changes. There are an average of 760 annual rule and rate changes in over 8,000 tax jurisdictions nationwide. Fortunately, there are best practices to mitigate this difficult task.
For example, it may require additional FTEs or temps to issue sales tax refunds for exempt purchases billed incorrectly. Or, your sales staff may be spending too much account management time helping customers fix sales tax billing errors, rather than using the time to generate new sales. Then there is the time and resources spent preparing for and managing an audit. Can you locate the certificates the auditor needs? Do you need to bother and frustrate your customers to reconstruct needed documentation to prove tax exemption? Lastly, have liabilities been accounted for, and if they have via reserves, what lost opportunity costs are associated with those funds? If only a better process for managing tax exempt customers were in place, the headaches, frustrations and costs on all sides could have been dramatically reduced.
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Summary
A commonly overlooked method to improve customer service, customer retention and profits is the process for collecting and managing exemption certificates and data from customers that are exempt from sales tax. Most companies have poor processes that are affecting customer retention and profits. Exemption certificate management may seem simple (just collect and store the exemption certificate) but is in fact complex. This is because there are hundreds of constantly changing exemptions in the thousands of jurisdictions across the country and this data must be tracked and managed by employees and internal systems. Mismanaging exemption data can negatively impact many areas of your business causing inaccurate billings, employees spending valuable time fixing errors, poor exempt customer experiences, huge audit assessments and many other problems. Although managing exemption certificates is complex, there are several best practices that can be employed inside a well-defined exemption certificate management process. A well-defined, enforced process will allow your company to improve customer service, customer retention and profits in an area most other companies ignore, providing your company a competitive advantage.
About Avalara
Based on Bainbridge Island, Washington, Avalara is transforming the sales and use tax compliance process for businesses of all sizes. With point-and-click ease, Avalara provides the fastest, easiest, most accurate and affordable way for companies to address their sales and use tax compliance. Avalara is the industrys most trusted provider of solutions, serving more than 40,000 registered users located throughout the U.S., Canada and abroad, delivering more than 350 million sales tax transactions, and filing and remitting more than $10 billion in tax collections per year.
Avalara may have patents, patent applications, trademarks, copyrights, or other intellectual property rights governing the subject matter in this document. Except as expressly provided in any written license agreement from Avalara, the furnishing of this document does not give you any license to these patents, trademarks, copyrights, or other intellectual property. 2013 Avalara, Inc. All rights reserved. Avalara, AvaTax, Avalara Returns, CertCapture, TaxRates, TrustFile, BPObridge, Laserbridge+, Sales Taxll, Sales TaxPC, SalestaxPC+, StatetaxII, and StatetaxPC are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Avalara, Inc. in the United States or other countries. All other trademarks are property of their respective owners.
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Appendix
Overall Management
Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) Exemption Certificate Management (ECM) Software
Web-based software for collecting, storing and managing exemption certificates Accessible across company Increases compliance level significantly Integrates with point-of-sale, e-commerce, tax decision and billing software
Collection
Point of Purchase Basic sales tax training for customer-facing employees SaaS ECM software
Built-in exemption certificate rules provide needed tax expertise to customer-facing employees
Storage
Centralized and electronic
Easy to locate exemption certificates SaaS exemption certificate management software
Validation
Use checklist in figure 3 Review soon after collection of exemption certificates SaaS ECM software with review capabilities
Billing
Always charge tax if no valid exemption certificate is on file Enter exemption data on jurisdiction level into tax decision and billing systems
Update when necessary
Maintenance
Track exemption certificate expirations
Collect new certificates prior to expiration
Type of exemption claimed Type of property purchased Normal course of business of the buyer (your customer) Signature of customer Some certificates require authorized signature of owner, partner or corporate office
Completely filled out No blanks! Good Faith Have a familiarity with exemptions available in the state, exemptions available that can be reasonably performed with type of property purchased, customer business types to confirm good faith conditions. If the certificate has an expiration, is it still in its validity period (non-expired)? Method of payment Government and non-profit exemptions stipulate that the purchase must be directly paid for with organization/government funds.
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Cross-Functional Process
Figure 3. Best practice exemption certificate workflow
CUSTOMER SERVICE
Create New Customer Record
TAX DEPARTMENT
A/R
YES
YES
Customer Exempt?
NO
NO
NO
Certificate Received?
YES
NO
Certificate Valid?
YES
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