The History of Sales Tax Software
How much have you thought about the history of sales tax software?
It’s probably not what keeps you up at night, but it actually makes a difference to your choice of sales and use tax software for your business — or it should.
Surprisingly, there have been only 15 patents awarded for sales tax software in the history of the United States.
The first patent awarded was in 1976, when the first electronic cash register able to calculate sales tax was developed. Cash registers had been around since 1879, but the early ones were just big adding machines with cash drawers that rang a bell when they were opened. Some observers say that prices like $.99 or $4.49 became customary because they required cashiers to open the drawer to give change — they couldn’t just quietly slip the bill into their pockets. So the cash registers cut down on both honest errors and dishonest actions. The electronic cash register with a sales tax calculation function was probably pretty exciting for retailers.
It took another two decades to come up with a cash register that could calculate tax and show it on a receipt separately, as most do today, and almost another decade before a cash register could calculate sales tax based on location.
In the 21st century, it is all about ecommerce. We focus less on cash registers and more on immediate consolidation and analysis of extensive sets of data; quite a big jump. It wasn’t until July of 2014 that Sales Tax DataLINK was awarded a patent for a completely new technology for filing sales tax. Shouldn’t you be looking at our software?
Don’t be left in the past. Stay up to date with the only patented software in the industry for decades.
Latest Articles
Sales Tax Software
Sales tax calculations and filing can be done by hand. When you make a sale, you figure out whether the goods and services are taxable and whether you have nexus in the buyer's tax jurisdiction. More on that later. Once you've determined that you need...
Customer Service and Your Sales Tax Solution
Sales tax is complicated. We've just gone through the annual flurry of back to school tax holidays, for example. If you're a remote seller of clothing, you probably sell mostly through retail. But you might have some direct to consumer sales. In some...
Sales Tax Holidays for E-commerce
A lot of our clients are manufacturers, contractors, or in some other industry that doesn't usually have to think much about sales tax. Retailers know they have to collect sales tax, and usually plan for it. We often hear from people who had no idea...
Recent Comments