There are several thousand sales tax jurisdictions in the United States with a complex array of state, county, city, and local tax rates. To complicate matters, items such as labor and freight are taxable in some jurisdictions, and not taxable in others. Some states even have sales tax maximums. All this makes collecting sales taxes for multiple states an extremely daunting task for most companies.

To simplify calculation and reporting of sales tax across multiple jurisdictions, Pierpoint-Martin offers a sales tax service which consists of two components:

Sales Tax Calculation
The first component of Pierpoint-Martin's sales tax service is a Sales Tax Calculation API. This application programming interface, which can be adapted for most major e-commerce and accounting packages, is passed shipping and order information, and returns the appropriate sales tax amount for the order.

The Sales Tax Calculation API also stores the shipping, order, and sales tax information for each order. This ensures that the Sales Tax Reporting Interface has all the necessary information to generate complete sales tax reports when it is time to report and remit the sales tax to the appropriate jurisdiction.

Sales Tax Reporting
The second component of Pierpoint-Martin's sales tax service is a Sales Tax Reporting Interface. The Sales Tax Reporting Interface allows accounting staff to quickly and easily retrieve sales tax information for use in reporting and remitting taxes collected.

Since different jurisdictions require different information on their sales tax returns, the Sales Tax Reporting Interface reports the appropriate information for each jurisdiction. In fact, in most cases, the Sales Tax Reporting interface output can be simply copied directly onto the appropriate sales tax return.