It is tax time, and we know how that goes for a lot of folks – running around trying to get reports together, figuring out what goes where, and getting everything in order to file or send to your accountant. 

We teamed up with our friends at Lightspeed and Quickbooks to put together this article to help small businesses prepare for tax season. If you feel disorganized or stressed about your taxes this year, then channel that energy into motivation to better prepare for next year.

Here are a few of the apps and services from the Lightspeed article to help you automate and systematize parts of your business to make next year’s tax season much easier:

1. Sync Your Accounting Software With Your POS

You can direct all of your key data including sales, expenses, discounts, and taxes to your accounting software (such as Quickbooks) simply by syncing it with your POS. This will help reduce inaccuracies and save you a lot of time come tax season. Many of these integrations will also sync your inventory, track expenses, mileage, and create invoices to help you make better business decisions.

2. Digitize and Organize Your Receipts

There are numerous services available to help you organize your receipts. Many people love Evernote, the popular note-taking app, which has a robust receipt tracking app too.

Shoeboxed specializes in receipt recording. We especially recommend Magic Envelopes, which are 9” x 12” Tyvek envelopes that are mailed directly to you. You can stuff them with receipts, business cards, invoices, work orders, etc., and they magically scan them and turn them into usable digital data.

3. Learn About and Track Sales Tax Nexus

If you sell to a state other than the state you are registered in to collect sales tax, you may need to remit sales tax in that state. Avalara offers some free easy-to-use tools and information. Start by checking out their free assessment tool to see if you are close to creating a tax nexus in another state. If you are getting close (or past it), watch their free recorded webinar series.

Avalara will help you keep track of your out-of-state sales throughout the year, so you will know when you are getting close to establishing nexus in another state.

4. Set up Your 3rd Party Apps Like Grubhub and Uber Eats To Run Through Your POS 

By running your 3rd party apps through your POS, you make the POS the official record of all sales. Doing this makes it much easier to get a total and accurate sales number. Running these apps through your POS also keeps track of the sales tax properly and keeps you from double paying sales tax. We have a whole post about this here. 

5. Automate your sales tax!

Sign up for DAVO and never worry about sales tax again. At tax time, you’ll know that all of your sales taxes were filed and paid in full and on time. Once a merchant sets up DAVO, they never need to manage sales tax for in-store sales again.

We also have a user-friendly dashboard to help you get helpful reports at tax time. Besides completely taking sales tax management off your plate, DAVO also offers robust reporting tools to help you track your sales and sales tax data by day, month, and year. Choose your POS and sign up right now.

Tax time can be stressful. We are lucky to have technology on our side to make it a little easier. We hope you find some of these apps and services helpful, so that next year at this time, your tax prep will be a breeze.