Experience the difference of "Elite".

Add option to export the Taxes Collected report in an Avalara MyLodgeTax-compatible format

Status: Requested 14 Votes
Chris L
Apr 13, 2023 2:50 PM
Joined May, 2017 200 posts

Like many OR users, I use Avalara MyLodgeTax to handle reporting and remitting my sales taxes.

The process of reporting figures to Avalara is relatively simple, but as a manual process, there's potential for transposition errors (I've previously reported the wrong property's totals in the wrong column and had to email them quickly to try to get it fixed before they finalize numbers). Especially for hosts with lots of properties, automating this would be both a big time-saver and also promote accuracy.

While both OwnerRez and Avalara have open APIs, which would be fantastic to implement, I'm guessing the dev work for one of them to write to the other's API is a non-starter at this time, so I'd like to propose a much simpler option for the time being:

Allow me to export the Taxes Collected report in an Avalara-compatible format.

The Taxes Collected report already has options to export in Excel, TSV, and CSV. It seems like it would be fairly trivial for OwnerRez to add another option that exports to an Excel file that is based on Avalara's published standard format, which I've uploaded here:

Report_Revenue_Upload.xlsx

With that addition, the month-end tax reporting process would basically consist of exporting that report, importing it to Avalara, and hitting submit, taking only a few seconds and thereby removing the possibility of introducing an error in reporting the revenue totals.

As this should be a fairly simple option, I'm hoping this can be implemented pretty quickly as it shouldn't take a lot of dev resources to code. (The only issue I can foresee is that OR would need to store the Avalara property IDs somewhere so that they can be included in the exported file.) But if you use Avalara MyLodgeTax, please upvote this request so it gets on OR's radar!

Alece
Apr 14, 2023 11:25 AM
Joined Jan, 2020 163 posts

Excellent idea, Chris! And you presented it all so clearly. Kudos! 

Richard C
Feb 2, 2024 1:57 PM
Joined Sep, 2023 1 post

We're in exact same situation!  Fingers crossed for the API integration sooner than later, but in the meantime a custom report would make the manual process easier for sure.  Thanks for your post, we will be watching from here.