Okay! So the sexy and headline grabbing part of things relating to the cloud are the ones about how virtually anything “as-a-service” (XaaS) enables companies to be more agile, responsive and operationally efficient with the advantages of moving CapEx to OpEx, etc.  However at the end of the day services need to be billed for. This includes the rending of bills that accurately reflect all of the taxes associated with the services provided.   

As noted, revenue management and getting taxes right may not be things you have bookmarked on your “favorites” lists.  However, do not under estimate their importance of literally and figuratively floating your boat. You need to be able to bill. You need to assure its accuracy for customer relations and compliance reasons, and you need to do so with as little pain and cost as possible.

This has always been true. The advent of cloud services, particularly software-as-a-Service (SaaS (News - Alert)) subscription ones, has only amplified the need and urgency for automated solutions to what have been time-consuming and mostly manual processes.

The realities are that SaaS tax compliance can be a complex and daunting task for companies with SaaS based offerings. From regulatory requirements to billing, tax calculation, filing and remittance, the process can be overwhelming. Worse, non-compliance has significant consequences.  Indeed, just think of all the taxing jurisdictions that may want a piece of the action and will be quite annoyed when you don’t comply with them.  In short, SaaS providers have a major need for business process automation solutions that make revenue management and taxation calculation simple, fast, secure and cost-effective at cloud-speed.  

The good news for SaaS providers is that solutions to their revenue management and taxation challenges exist.  Not surprisingly they happen to be cloud-based.

If you’d like to get educated on solutions and best practices for making the monetization and compliance of your SaaS offering cost effective and efficient, the forthcoming webinar, A Survivor’s Guide to SaaS Revenue Management and Taxation: how to offer your customers what they really want and keep the taxman happy, is something you may wish to participate in live.  To be held Wednesday, May 27, 2015 2:00 PM EDT 11:00 AM PDT, join myself and Matthew Grattan, Sr. National Director, Ecommerce, Avalara and JK Chelladurai, Founder & CEO, OneBill as we discuss in detail:

• A few key metrics about the SaaS industry
• Everything you need to know about SaaS taxation and compliance
• Building your SaaS pricing strategies to maximize revenue
• Solutions that simplify the tax compliance burden.

This is a unique opportunity to hear from and question recognized subject matter experts.  For its part, Avalara’s cloud-based platform works within your own financial, billing, ecommerce, or point of sale system to deliver accurate tax calculations in real time via a secure Internet connection. OneBill provides an enterprise-class subscription billing platform that takes the complexity of holistic billing and combines it with high performance CRM and subscriber management systems.

Being sassy in the market is a wonderful thing these days, and so is being smart about SaaS revenue management and taxation compliance.