Automating Tax Exemption Certificate Services with Silvia Aguirre of CertCapture
Silvia Aguirre is the co-founder of CertCapture, an exemption certificate management solution that is now owned by Avalara. Silvia was previously the Chief Certificate Officer at Avalara, but now, she is currently the General Manager of Certificate Management at Avalara, and she manages product direction for the CertCapture suite of products.
Silvia was the co-founder and principal of Tax Technology Services which created CertCapture. She had overall responsibility for the operational efficiency of the organization as well as the tax knowledge base. She has also served as an auditor for the State of Texas and its San Antonio and New York offices.
In this episode…
One thing the COVID-19 outbreak has shown the world is how crucial technology has become in keeping things running despite physical restrictions. Many countries all over the world, the U.S. included, are under lockdown with a huge percentage of the workforce working from home. But for companies that have yet to adopt technology as part of their operations, they have come face to face with the realization that because their work is done manually, they cannot operate outside the office.
The same case applies to companies that have been handling their tax exemption certificate services manually. It is a tedious process, especially for a company that collects exemption certificates from many states. However, Silvia Aguirre created a simple solution for this through CertCapture, which is an exemption certificate management solution that can be done virtually.
In this episode of Sales Tax and More, Michael Fleming and Ellie Moffat interview Silvia Aguirre about how the Wayfair ruling impacted the collection and retrieval of exemption certificates, what her CertCapture software can do for companies, how the technology and automation helps companies in filing their tax exemption certificates, and her best tips for getting ahead of disruptive changes. Stay tuned.
For more information about our own exemption certificate management click here
Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:
The effects of the Wayfair ruling and changes in nexus on Silvia Aguirre's work in exemption certificates and resale certificates
Why drop-shipping and audit risk are one of the main factors that lead to large audit assessments
How technology and automation can help scale new regulations
Silvia's recommendations for processes and best practices for getting ahead of disruptive changes
How CertCapture can help solve disruptive changes and exemption certificate challenges for companies
Silvia discusses the validation services offered by Avalara
How to get more information about CertCapture and get in touch with Silvia Aguirre
Resources Mentioned in This Episode
Ellie Moffat's email: emoffat@salestaxandmore.com
Silvia Aguirre's email: silvia.aguirre@avalara.com
Connect with Michael
Sponsor for This Episode
Sales Tax and More assists companies and their trusted advisors like CPAs with sales tax needs. They offer consulting and research, registrations, returns, and so much more. Over the years they have assisted thousands of sellers both foreign and domestic with their tax issues in the United States and in Canada.
Episode Transcript - Audio Version
[0:10] Intro: Welcome to Sales Tax and More, your go-to resource for all things state tax related. Now, here is your host, Michael Fleming.
[0:26] Mike: Hello everyone. Mike Fleming here, founder of Sales Tax and More, and today's co-host of the Sales Tax and More podcast, where we talk about everyone's favorite topic, which is, of course, sales tax. And today we've got a great guest. And she knows just about everything there is to know about exemption and sales tax resale certificates. And I'm going to introduce her in a little bit, but right now, I want to introduce you to my co-host, Ellie Moffat.
[1:01] Ellie: Hey everyone, it's really great to be here. For those of you who don't know Sales Tax and More, I'll do a quick introduction. Sales Tax and More is a full service consulting and solutions firm. We have a really great team here of experienced tax professionals who are very dedicated to fulfilling your state tax and related needs. So we do a lot of consultations, research and like our name states more, so returns, registrations. And Mike, I'm gonna flip it back to you and let's get the ball rolling here.
[1:32] Mike: Okay, and it's my pleasure to introduce y'all to Silvia Aguirre. She's the founder, or co-founder, of CertCapture. And I've known Silvia for years. When we first started working with her at CertCapture, it's a great product out there, so great that Avalara said that they had to own it and they went out now Silvia and her team are all a part of Avalara. Silvia is currently the general manager of the certificate management, previously chief certificate officer at Avalara, where she manages the product direction under the CertCapture suite of products. She's previously the co-founder principal of tax technology services, which actually created CertCapture and she has overall responsibility for the operational efficiency of the organization as well as the tax knowledge base. Silvia has served as an auditor for the state of Texas in their San Antonio and New York offices. And at this time, Silvia, welcome to the Sales Tax and More podcast.
[2:45] Silvia: Well, thank you for having me. I know you said favorite topic sales and use tax, but I have to say my favorite topic is exemption certificate management. I just, you know, I think I'm the queen of exemption certificate management. I've been doing it for many years, and like you pointed out, we’ve known each other for a while, you know, and very much enjoy the world of sales and use tax and, of course, our CertCapture. And I'm glad to be here, Mike, thank you for inviting me.
[3:14] Mike: Oh, our pleasure. And I would agree with you, you're not getting any arguments here you are the queen of resale and exemption certificates. So we, you know, we've seen a lot of changes out there over the last couple of years with Wayfair. And how Nexus is changing. You know, companies, you know, are being impacted in lots of different ways. How would you say this has impacted what you do in the exemption certificate and resale certificate world?
[3:45] Silvia: Yeah, that's a very important question, right? Because Wayfair, although it's been over a year now, it is still impacting a lot of companies. And when people think of Wayfair, the first thing that comes to their mind is taxation, right? They've, they just focus on how are we going to tax more customers? How are we going to register in other states? You know, how are we going to manage, you know, additional input and output from our earpiece systems, everything surrounding Wayfair. But for me, my first reaction was, there's a huge impact for exemption certificates. And that always seems to be an afterthought. You know, when people think of Wayfair, and the impact that it has had in pretty much every business that never was registering all the states. And you can imagine if your enterprise company, you probably were not as impacted because you were registered in many places already that you collect the taxes, you collected exemption certificates, but I’ve seen a huge volume increase in the mid-market. Companies that were wholesalers, distributors, manufacturers that all of a sudden you have to register in many places, and the nature of their business is not necessarily to tax, right? And so everything they might be selling, you might be resold, or everything there might be distributing might be put into a manufacturing process. So their impact there is the increase of exemption certificates, they have to collect the moment they register in different states. So maybe in the past, you had to collect 1000 certificates, because you were only registered in one state, or maybe two states. Just imagine if you open it up to all of the states in those 1000 certificates just multiplied, you know, times 40, right? So now you're dealing with 40,000 certificates. And I'm not exaggerating, I've seen this actually happen. And so what do you want to experience when you're figuring out how Wayfair is impacting you and your exemption certificates? You really need to think about your audit risk. Immediately, you're open for audit risk because you have no documentation right off the bat. You went and registered, you're in the business of wholesaling, you don't need a tax, you need to immediately collect exemption certificates, right? So that is a huge audit risk that you need to immediately take on the moment that you're registering states. And the second thing you have to think about is, how is Wayfair affecting your company with the relationships that you have with your customers? How do you address them and explain to them that you have to be collecting this document when yesterday, before you registered, everything was fine? So one of the impacts that Wayfair really has had is in communication. How do companies communicate to other companies, and now there's a reason that there is additional burden that needs to be shared between all of the companies.
[6:37] Mike: Yeah, and, and Silvia that's, that's so important. You know, one area that we see, in addition to what you're talking about is in companies that do drop shipping, and all of a sudden, they have this responsibility to collect certificates in so many more states and they need to collect it from these, sometimes very unsophisticated, customers of theirs. And they just don't understand why all of a sudden they have to be providing certificates in so many more states. Now, we generally see that for companies that have a requirement to collect certificates, you know, when we're talking about audit risk, this is usually what we see as one of the largest factors for large audit assessments. Is that, you know, typical with what you're seeing also?
[7:35] Silvia: Yeah, absolutely. And I'm glad you brought up the drug shipment and the audit risk together, right? Because just like I explained all of this saying you have to deal with all these new regulations in many different states, and we've seen the states actually raise our hand and say - well, now we have more opportunity to audit, right? Now we can actually go after all these companies that, in the past, at least their sense was, we cannot touch them because they're not registered because of this economic nexus that used to exist before Wayfair, right. But more importantly, you know, with drop shipments is a little bit more critical in my mind. And I'll explain why. Most companies that used to do drop shipping never really cared how much they were shipping into a particular state for somebody else that, you know, didn't care how many invoices or transactions they were doing in a particular state. Well Wayfair is forcing people to to on both sides, the drop shipper and the and the people that are asking them to drop ship to really start looking at dollar values and looking at a number of transactions and it’s both ways. If I'm shipping something to you, you know that somebody else asked me to into your state of Texas and all of a sudden this particular person is telling me to drop ship to another hundred people in Texas. I know that information, and I have to share that with the person that is asking me to drop ship. They might not even know that they now have an obligation, just because they asked me to drop ship, right? And everybody just looks at the first level of complexity, when in reality is more than that. It is information that is in your fingertips, and now you have to start taxing somebody because you know, you drop ship more. So the risk of audit is high when it comes to exemption certificates. Personally, I think the automation of taxing, you know, is fairly simple. We've taxed in every jurisdiction, you know, usually you just turn on the taxation and off you go with whatever rates you're going to tax. Collecting and document before you tax is actually a bigger challenge in my mind.
[9:44] Mike: Absolutely
[9:44] Ellie: Yeah. We're talking about a lot of problems here, a lot of increased audit risk, a lot of volume. And you kind of briefly started to touch on this, but how can technology and automation help scale for new regulations?
[9:58] Silvia: And that's a great question, right? I mean, especially right now, we happen to be going to COVID-19. Right? When we thought about this, this podcast, we didn't realize we were going to be in thia situation. And just picture it. All of these businesses are not in the office, there's nobody, maybe even they had a manual process, evaluating exemption certificates. They really don't have that ability. How do, how are these documents getting into the company? And without technology in this day of age to collect exemption certificates in automation, it just doesn't make any sense, right? I think companies are going to go back to their normal lives, eventually, and they're gonna raise their hand and say, why didn't we have this automation before, right? And a lot of companies have omni channel, you know, places. Maybe you had a retail store, but maybe you also had an e-commerce site and maybe you also sold to a marketplace. You have salespeople out there. So all of these sales are coming from different places, and without automation, that's the only way you can manage exemption certificates. You want to have a precise touch with your customers, you want to you don't want to overwhelm them, overwhelming with requests. You want to ring that b2b experience, you know, connect the invoice with the exemption certificate with the collection to be more automated. And the technology that exists right now for exemption certificate management allows you to do that. You just need to be open, and allow your departments to take in all of this new information and just automate it. This is the time to automate if I ever thought of any other time.
[11:34] Ellie: Yes, I think I would agree with you there. So what are the recommended processes and best practices to get ahead of all these disruptive changes? I mean, especially the current disruptive changes that are amplifying everything,
[11:50] Silvia: Right. Yes. You know, it's interesting. I mean, who would have thought this COVID-19? This is very disruptive to the organizations, and people are still doing business right? I mean, it’s, unfortunately, people that are more restaurants or smaller businesses, but most b2b are still doing some work. My recommendation would be to just put pencil to paper and write a process. You need to have a process. You need to have buy in from the organization. Go to your executives. Go to your directors. Go to everybody that you need to talk to, and put them in a room and say this is important. This is going to cost us liability, we need to have a process and we cannot just do this one offi. It needs to be part of the ecosystem. And then after that, you also need to understand what is impacting you. What were the regulations? What are the products that possibly now are taxable versus nontaxable if you open up to other states? And overall, how do you standardize the process right? If you talk to the right people in your organization, they're going to understand that this needs to be automated.
[13:00] Mike: Great points, Silvia, and in there are so many challenges out there right now. I know how great CertCapture is. You know how great CertCapture is. But, how best to get the point across to all our listeners. How can CertCapture solve these issues and challenges for them and their clients?
[13:22] Silvia: Absolutely, yeah. So CertCapture is an exemption certificate management solution. And when people think of exemptions or they begin manage, they think about collecting, and they think about storing, and then they think about retrieving these documents when an auditor knocks in their door, right? And it’s an ecosystem where you can maintain, and it's not a one off, right? It's a constant, living software that allows you to have this automated process throughout the organization. Where CertCapture really shines is in the software itself. Our software is an all-inclusive software that accommodates omni channel. And what I mean by that, if you say you had a e-com site that you maintain in your organization, and you're able to sell to this e-com site. The software has ERPs and connectors that allow you to connect the software to your capture to this e-commerce solution where somebody's shopping in and see it in the shopping cart, they can actually create a click - I want to give you an exemption certificate - all online, all signed online, without disrupting the sale. Zero out the tags, you store that certificate, it gets into CertCapture, and off you go with your sale. And that can be very important now, especially with b2b e-commerce really growing. In the past it was not as prominent because there were large sales, right? But now, it is possible to do that as well with the e-commerce solution that is part of the software. A lot of people are now used to going to my account. So we have Amazon, or Ebay, or anything, that you have you know how to sign yourself up, you know how to add your credit card, you should know how to add your exemption certificates to manage for a particular company. So you don't have to wait until somebody goes into the shopping cart for them to buy exempt, you can actually allow them, right, have your customer take control of their own exemption certificates, you know, and upload them and maintain them or finish them electronically in maintaining within their my account that you also have in your e-commerce site. We also have what we call Cert Express. Cert Express with CertCapture is it's just a mechanism you know, in a very important mechanism, to allow anybody to fill an exemption certificate and provide all of the required data. There's no additional setup, you know, once you get CertCapture, Cert Express is a part of the process. All I need to say is - Hey Mike, I need your certificate. You go to Cert Express, you fill it out, and it won't let you finish that certificate unless it's completed. And then it comes to me and it’s all done. There are no manual processes, it’s all automated. So Cert Expresses is a big part of CertCapture. And as well as we have APIs. So if you do have a solution that is more customized to your organization, and maybe you’re going to use out of the box items that we have, is the same thing with our APIs. All we did is took our APIs packaged them in a nice way for you to use and right out of the box. But you can use our APIs to do all kinds of things, whether they're adding information to your API system, taking information from CertCapture and displaying anywhere else in the organization, or you can send information into CertCapture. So it is very, very easy to use if you know how to deal with APIs. And nowadays it seems to be a more common thing, right? More people know about APIs, and they did even five years ago, Mike, you and I had no idea what an API was when we met each other.
[17:00] Mike: I'll let you in on a little bit of a secret. I still don't know what an API is. I’m just kidding. I have people who know what an API is.
[17:10] Silvia: Exactly, you know people. And this is why it's so important on the process, right? Find the right person, and you show the documentation, they're going to say, I know how to do this. Let's do it. And lastly, you know, I do want to touch a little bit on on our retail module, which is not very well known. But you know, again, omni channel solution, you know, we have stores and people show up in your store, allow them to fill that exemption certificate right there, rather than having what is the joke somebody to say you have 400 salespeople trying to explain sales and use tax exemption certificates at a store right? So you know, that, you know, mechanism allows you to complete those exemption certificates without really disrupting their purchasing experience in the retail store. And one other very important thing that actually I did want to touch because you mentioned it earlier, was about drop shipping. CertCapture, out of the box, actually understands drop shipping, in which states allow drop shipping, and it's easy to assimilate certificates, you know, when they come to you and to define whether should accept the certificate or not, depending on drop shipments. But those modules, separately, right? I mean, it's very impactful. This is a whole system. This is just not a solution for you to store your certificates. This is a leaving software that allows you to connect ERPs, tax engines, you know, CRMs, you know, anything that you can think of, because we give you all the tools to do that.
[18:44] Mike: All great, and especially, you know, the Cert Express makes it so much easier to make sure that you're actually getting valid certificates. But in addition to that, I believe Avalara also offers validation services. Is that correct?
[19:03] Silvia: That is true. That is true, you know, short of you're not using Cert Express, right? Do we want everything to be automated? There is a possibility that maybe you contact us and you say - Hey, I already contacted 10,000 customers, I'm not going to contact them. Again, I have all of these certificates stored in PDF format, already, right? I want to put them into CertCapture. But actually, I don't know if they were valid or not, you know, and I rather just contact the ones that are not valid. So they can actually send all of those documents to us. And we have a whole team that does manage services that they can look at those certificates. They can upload them into the system, and then they can come back to you and say, because they didn't go to the Cert Express process, we basically substituting in the Cert Express process, with a human trying to go through this. And they've been doing this, you know, since tax technology services base, you know, we have very experienced people that truly understand what an exemption certificate should look like.
[20:03] Mike: Absolutely. And I can attest to how great the team is there. On a separate note, though, we also offer a lot of support services for our customers, our clients, who actually use CertCapture also. So we can, you know, offer some of these validation and different types of exemption certificate management projects that, when you're using the software here, so a lot of times there's no need for any additional services. It's that good. But sometimes you need a little bit of a helping hand. Silvia does have a team, as do we, to help you get along. Silvia, how do people get in touch with you? How do they get more information about CertCapture in particular, but a Avalera in general.
[20:57] Silvia: So you can always go to avalara.com. That's always a good place to start. There's going to be document management, you know, exemption certificate sections that you can click through and give you some resources that we have available for everybody. You know, if you want to learn about Wayfair, that's a great place to find and do research. But you can always contact me directly, you know, Mike, you know, silvia.aguirre@avalara.com. I'm always glad to answer people's questions, and I'm always open to any comments, suggestions or anything they want to bring about exemption certificates.
[21:35] Mike: Great. Thank you very much Silvia. You're always a fountain of information. Perhaps at some point in the future, we can have you back and we can get into a little bit deeper on some of these particular project aspects of the software. But we greatly appreciate your time today.
[21:55] Silvia: Thank you again for inviting me, Mike. Always a pleasure.
[22:00] Mike: And remember, if you have sales tax needs we offer many solutions and services you can reach out to us directly. Ellie is generally very accessible. She can be reached by email at emoffat@salestaxandmore or you can visit our website at www.salestaxandmore.com. In addition to the services we offer, we have a number of free webinars that provide for CPE credit, and thank you, everyone, for attending our podcast today. Take care.
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