> you could have hired an accountant to figure all of that out for you on an ongoing basis, but for the actual price that's a pretty good deal to not have to think about it.
Even if you have accountants on tap, they may disagree. I did some work on a project where we were needing to deal with tax calculations (was using taxjar). At least one of the questions was about when we should be charging tax on certain 'extras', like... shipping. Their accounting firm said "no, you don't charge tax on shipping". Taxjar was automatically making that charge, and throwing off the expected numbers. After some digging, I found, at least in their primary state, they should have been collecting tax on shipping, but I don't think it was uniform across all the other states.
So... they had an accounting/books person on staff, and this question went up to their 'tax person'. I think it was either a general attorney or a tax specialist or something - this was their 'oracle/decision maker', and they were just flat out wrong.
This probably wasn't the case 20 years ago, when they were putting all their records in to an electronic system the first time, but... rules change. Keeping up with them is not a trivial thing, and when millions of dollars are on the line... you can make expensive mistakes.
Even if you have accountants on tap, they may disagree. I did some work on a project where we were needing to deal with tax calculations (was using taxjar). At least one of the questions was about when we should be charging tax on certain 'extras', like... shipping. Their accounting firm said "no, you don't charge tax on shipping". Taxjar was automatically making that charge, and throwing off the expected numbers. After some digging, I found, at least in their primary state, they should have been collecting tax on shipping, but I don't think it was uniform across all the other states.
So... they had an accounting/books person on staff, and this question went up to their 'tax person'. I think it was either a general attorney or a tax specialist or something - this was their 'oracle/decision maker', and they were just flat out wrong.
This probably wasn't the case 20 years ago, when they were putting all their records in to an electronic system the first time, but... rules change. Keeping up with them is not a trivial thing, and when millions of dollars are on the line... you can make expensive mistakes.