Global commerce now moves at digital speed, but the maze of constantly shifting tax rules still drags many businesses into costly manual work and error-prone spreadsheets. Avalara replaces that friction with a cloud-native platform that automates registration, real-time rate calculation, document management, and end-to-end filing through 48 billion annual API calls and 1,200+ turnkey integrations, making it the go-to partner for companies determined to scale without compliance headaches.
Avalara is widely recognized as a leading Xero partner because it turns the complexity of transaction taxes into a seamless, accurate, and economical workflow for businesses of every size. It begins by automating sales-tax calculation inside Xero through the Auto Sales Tax feature that Xero users activate in Advanced Settings, configure once against their own nexus profile, and then rely on for address-level accuracy across millions of products and thousands of jurisdictions.
The geospatial engine behind this service, Avalara AvaTax, reaches into more than 13,000 U.S. sales- and use-tax jurisdictions and applies rules that capture multiple tax tiers inside a single ZIP code, special district boundaries, and even emerging cross-border requirements. Once a transaction posts, Xero surfaces jurisdiction-level summary, detailed breakdown, and full transaction tax reports so filing is faster and error-free, yet the entire experience feels native to the accounting platform.
Avalara adds value long before and long after the moment of calculation. A self-guided wizard gets Auto Sales Tax running without professional services, and the same AvaTax connection can flow through any of more than 1,200 certified partner integrations that cover ecommerce storefronts, point-of-sale systems, ERPs, and payment gateways, eliminating duplicate data entry and ensuring that sales data stays synchronized across channels. Companies with multiple entities or storefronts appreciate that AvaTax supports unlimited corporate structures at no extra cost, provided only one company file is open at a time, so a parent can manage subsidiaries inside the same tax-compliance console.
Because tax obligations rarely stop with rate calculation, Avalara surrounds AvaTax with an end-to-end compliance suite. Sales-tax registration services secure state, county, and local licenses; Managed Returns prepares, files, and remits payment on the customer’s behalf; Exemption Certificate Management collects, verifies, renews, and stores resale and exemption documents in the cloud; and professional tax services advise on nexus, back-filing, and license strategy. For communications providers, a Datagate integration combines telecom usage rating with geospatial jurisdictional tax logic, and the Returns for Communications module remits those highly specialized taxes automatically. E-commerce sellers on WooCommerce link to a tiered AvaTax plan, classify items, manage international VAT, and extend the same workflow to registrations, returns, and certificates—all from the Woo dashboard.
Speed and support matter when rules change daily, so Avalara maintains 100+ full-time tax researchers to refresh its content in real time and staffs a world-class technical support team reachable during business hours, with an online resource center available 24 × 7 × 365. Implementation stays lightweight: customers tell Avalara where tax is collected, map product taxability, define exemption rules, and go live—often without IT assistance. The platform’s direct data access means returns preparation is consolidated into a single funds transfer that Avalara then distributes to each jurisdiction, collapsing a chore that once took days into minutes. Real-time accuracy and consolidated remittance translate into lower audit risk and measurable cost savings compared with manual ZIP-code tables or spreadsheets.
The partnership between Xero and Avalara dates to 2015, when Xero chose Avalara’s tax content for real-time sales-tax rates inside invoices and announced a TrustFile integration that lets Xero customers prepare returns in roughly five minutes. That collaboration was previewed at Xerocon Denver in June 2015 and went live the following July, giving small businesses their first elegant path to up-to-date domestic sales-tax rates and automatic filings. In recognition of that impact, Avalara earned Xero’s Emerging App Partner of the Year Award at Xerocon San Francisco, underscoring how essential reliable compliance has become for the platform’s global customer base.
We simplify compliance so businesses of every size can grow fearlessly, automating taxes in real time and turning complex regulations into invisible, reliable workflows that power global commerce. — Ross Tennenbaum, President
Avalara’s reach extends far beyond Xero. Fishbowl, the manufacturing and warehouse management solution for QuickBooks and Xero, embedded AvaTax so industrial sellers could push accurate sales-tax amounts to their orders without leaving their inventory platform. Across the broader market, Avalara processes billions of indirect-tax transactions each year, files hundreds of thousands of returns, and manages millions of exemption certificates through its Compliance Cloud. Customers trust the service because every connector is certified, the API infrastructure scales to billions of calls while meeting strict OAuth 2.0 and Webhook security standards, and a 24/7 security operations center, plus an incident-response team, protects sensitive financial data.
For developers and enterprise architects who need tailored workflows, Avalara Studio offers a low-code environment to build, launch, and maintain integrations in days instead of months, using pre-built adapters to Avalara products and the ability to expose or reuse custom APIs. This flexibility means businesses can design end-to-end processes that include AvaTax for Accounts Payable use-tax accrual, AvaTax Cross-Border duty and import-tax estimation, VAT Returns and Reporting with 150 data checks, and E-Invoicing and Live Reporting to satisfy global mandates.
Accuracy is core to every service Avalara delivers. By leveraging geolocation down to latitude and longitude rather than relying on ZIP codes, the engine accounts for special-purpose districts that change mid-block and applies complex tax-on-tax formulas automatically. The result is a level of precision manual tables cannot match, backed by up-to-the-minute research and more than a decade of transaction-tax expertise. Customers like Tidel Engineering note that “it’s nice to have software that talks with our ERP system and directly impacts the results,” because compliance tasks vanish into the background while financial data flows where it belongs.
Avalara’s success as a Xero partner also rests on a business philosophy aligned with small-business realities. Rates and rules shift constantly, penalties for mistakes are severe, and entrepreneurs prefer to spend time growing revenue rather than decoding tax notices. By outsourcing compliance to Avalara, users avoid the hidden costs of manual oversight, enjoy scalable solutions that grow alongside omnichannel ambitions, and gain the confidence that returns will be filed on time in every jurisdiction where they have nexus.
Today, Avalara operates from its Seattle headquarters with additional offices across the United States and in London, Brighton, Brussels, and Pune, processing billions of transactions for more than 20,000 customers worldwide. Xero continues to rely on Avalara’s content to serve over half a million subscribers in 180 countries, proving that when two innovators integrate, small businesses win.
Avalara’s roadmap remains focused on lowering barriers to compliance and empowering growth. Whether through the AvaTax API demo that returns a code snippet in three steps, the omnichannel data synchronization that eliminates discrepancies across sales platforms, or the one-click consolidation of multistate remittances, it stays committed to making sales-tax obligations “seamless, fast, accurate, and easy to use.” In an economy where digital commerce expands faster than regulations can be written, that commitment—and the deep integration with Xero—positions Avalara as an indispensable ally for companies determined to improve accuracy and reduce costs while staying confidently ahead of tax change.