Sales tax and VAT software for FinancialForce

Yes. FinancialForce changed its name to Certinia, announced by the company at Salesforce World Tour in New York on May 4, 2023, and financialforce.com now resolves to certinia.com. Certinia's own wording is that the new name aligns better with its expanded suite of solutions. The accounting product most people still call FinancialForce is now Certinia Accounting, inside the Financial Management Cloud. Everything on this page is sourced from Certinia's current documentation, and Commenda connects the same product whichever name you use for it.

Only from tax codes you build. In Certinia Accounting you create a separate tax code for each type of tax you want to record, and its own documented example set for the US is one code per jurisdiction: PA-State, MA-State, Philadelphia-PA-City, Boston-MA-City. Each code holds a list of rates you enter to three decimal places, with the date each one comes into force. Tax codes are org-level, so every company in the org shares the same set. With Avalara AvaTax connected, Certinia recommends creating one tax code and setting its rate to zero, because the AvaTax value replaces anything calculated internally or entered by a user. Commenda maintains state, county, city, and district rates and applies them to the transactions already in your ledger.

UK VAT, yes. Certinia's Tax Reporting package connects to HMRC and submits VAT returns directly under Making Tax Digital: you authorise the connection, verify the figures, read and accept the declaration, and submit. It also gathers the data for the Australian Business Activity Statement and produces Forms 1099-MISC and 1099-NEC for US companies. Those three functions are the whole package, and none of them is a US sales tax return. For VAT elsewhere, Certinia sends transaction data to Avalara VAT Reporting, which it describes as a third-party application covering 35 countries. Commenda files across all 50 states on each state's required frequency and across 70+ countries from one platform.

No. Certinia decides which tax code to default onto a document from the company's record type, the tax statuses on the account and the product, and whether a VAT group exists between you and the account. Those are configuration settings, and the Avalara setup assumes you have already told Avalara which jurisdictions you have nexus in. Commenda measures the same Certinia transactions against economic and physical thresholds in all 50 states, every EU member state, and 70+ countries, and notifies you at 80% of a registration threshold, before you cross it.

Only if you run Avalara's certificate system, and Certinia is blunt about the alternative. Its own instruction is that if the AvaTax Exemption Certificate Management System is used, it must be enabled with all available certificates registered, and that if it is disabled, certificate numbers from Accounting will be taken on trust. For a one-off exemption you put a value in the customer reference field on the sales document, which Certinia passes to the purchase order number field in AvaTax. Commenda collects certificates through a self-service portal, validates each one at upload, applies it automatically in the states where it is valid, and chases expiries.

Not through Avalara VAT Reporting. Certinia states that the integration does not support journal documents, so if you make a tax adjustment using a journal, that amount is not reported in your VAT return. It also notes that correcting a tax code error by journal is common practice in the UK and not allowed in some other countries, Spain among them. Commenda builds the return from the underlying transactions and their adjustments, and files an amended return where a period needs correcting.

By mapping, and Certinia says what happens without it. You either map each Accounting product to an AvaTax tax code, or match your product code to an AvaTax item code, which takes precedence. Certinia states that if you do neither, AvaTax calculates tax based solely on company and account addresses. For a services or SaaS business that is the whole question, because whether a line is taxable depends on whether it is software, a subscription, a deliverable, or labour. Commenda maps your product tax codes as part of onboarding and keeps them current as state rules change.

Yes, and it is worth knowing what is shared. Certinia companies are created with a record type of VAT, GST, Combined, or SUT, and each one links to its own company in AvaTax by company code. Tax codes, though, are org-level and shared across every company. Commenda keeps a registration footprint, an exposure position, and a filing calendar per entity, so a threshold crossed by one company is never netted against another.