Sales tax departments and auditors care about consistent, repeatable, and reliable sales tax collection and filing processes. If you’re doing everything the same way every time, you’re less likely to make a mistake and you’ll catch any mistakes you might be making more easily. Golfers, for instance, want a swing that’s consistent and repeatable time after time, eliminating mistakes they might make from swing to swing. Sales tax filing is the same–eliminating room for error is the number one goal for a sales tax department. Automation can help you achieve error-free sales tax returns.
Processes that are the same from filing period to filing period and done the same way will prevent missed steps, accidentally excluding whole sales receipts, or not taking into account exemption certificates. Automation, by definition, gets rid of human error that can be tiny and hard to detect. Humans typically make the same errors over and over again, like always speeding 5 miles an hour over or neglecting to do the same step in a process every time. Researchers have discovered it takes an average of 66 days for a human to change daily habits. In a sales tax filing, 66 filings full of mistakes aren’t acceptable. Instead, automated sales tax filing allows you to eliminate errors immediately and forever. For instance, whereas an individual doing a sales tax return might consistently neglect an exemption, add it into an automated sales tax filing system once and it’ll be there until you take it out.
You’ll have no worries about an individual remembering during one filing period and then forgetting during the next when she’s in a hurry. Automation also makes it a lot faster to file sales and use tax because, in a matter of moments, a computer can check for errors and create reports. It can take hundreds of hours for a human to give the same amount of attention to a thousand sales receipts. Automation allows you to spend your time on other things that cannot be automated or which are too costly to automate. Sales tax filing software is far more cost-efficient to automate than to pay a worker to do it by hand.
