MuleSoft Taps Avalara for Automated Tax Calculation in the Cloud

April 10, 2012 Alex Woodie

The deadline for federal income tax returns is less than a week away, putting millions of Americans under the gun to get their returns finished. And while the tax code isn’t getting any easier to understand, two companies–MuleSoft and Avalara–are partnering to simplify the calculation of taxes with a new solution called iApp4Tax that will streamline the way that business software integrates with Avalara’s tax-calculation service.

The new iApp4Tax offering is sold by MuleSoft, a provider of commercial open source integration software called Mule iON that runs in the cloud, or what MuleSoft calls its integration platform as a service (iPaaS). iApp4Tax will run as a packaged integration application on Mule iON and streamline the way that various business applications–including ERP, ecommerce, and accounting software–integrate with Avalara’s unique services that automate the calculation of sales and seller’s use tax.

Avalara does the grunt work of tracking tax laws across more than 60,000 tax jurisdictions in all 50 states, U.S. Territories and Possessions, and Canadian provinces. It packages that into a shrink-wrapped product that runs as an RPG or Windows program, or as a software as a service (SaaS) solution.

Many IBM i shops have taken advantage of the ERP integration work that Avalara has done to connect its tax solutions to popular ERP packages from Infor, IBS, HarrisData, Solarsoft, TDCI (MAC-PAC), and Chadwick and Associates (CAMS), and others.

The iApp4Tax offering should expand the number of ERP systems that Avalara can easily integrate with, says Avalara CEO Scott McFarlane. “Mule iON provides a great alternative to those customers who previously relied on custom integration code to access our sales tax solutions,” McFarlane says in a press release. “With iApp4Tax, many more customers can now quickly and easily access our advanced tax decision technology.”