Sales tax and VAT software for Business Central

No. Microsoft's United States local functionality page lists every US tax feature by name: basic tax setup, reporting sales tax in the US, use tax and purchase tax, unrealized sales tax, and the IRS 1099 and 1096 forms. A sales tax return is not among them, and neither is electronic filing to any state. The same page lists tax improvements under future legislation being investigated, planned for the 2027 release wave. The one report named for the job, Sales Taxes Collected, has been removed from the Business Manager and Accountant role centres, so the analysis is now yours to build too. Commenda files across all 50 states on each state's required frequency, tracks remittance per jurisdiction, and files amended returns where a period needs correcting.

Yes, and it does more than submit. The Making Tax Digital VAT extension retrieves your VAT obligations from HMRC, reminds you when one is approaching or overdue, submits the return, and reads back your VAT liabilities and payments. Three caveats are worth knowing. HMRC agent services are not supported. Group VAT is not handled inside the extension itself, and Microsoft ships a separate UK-only VAT Group Management extension for that, which needs a full licence for every participant. And there is no dry run: Microsoft documents an HMRC limitation that test submissions of VAT returns are not possible, so you can only send real ones. Commenda files UK VAT alongside the other 70+ countries it covers, so the UK is not a separate workflow.

Not for tax reporting. Microsoft states that each Business Central environment is meant to handle regulatory reporting in one single country or region, and gives the example that the Dutch version handles VAT reporting in the Netherlands but not elsewhere. The United States version does not support VAT reporting in other countries unless a partner extension or a customer-specific code modification brings it. Microsoft maintains local functionality for 21 countries, 15 of them in Europe, and hands everywhere else to partner localization apps in Marketplace. Commenda works the other way round. Every entity sits on one dashboard, across 70+ countries, with consolidated registrations, exposure, and filings rather than one system per country.

No. Nothing in Microsoft's Business Central library documents economic nexus or threshold monitoring. What it documents is the opposite instruction: where you sell to a customer in a state you have no legal location in, Microsoft tells you to zero out that jurisdiction so no tax is collected. That is a setting you make, not an obligation it finds, so a state you never set up produces no tax and no warning. Most states use $100,000 in sales or 200 transactions in a rolling 12 months, and California and New York use $500,000. Commenda measures your transactions against economic and physical thresholds in all 50 states and 70+ countries, and notifies you at 80% of a registration threshold, before you cross it.

It holds a number. The certificate itself sits outside Business Central. The customer record takes a Tax Exemption No. of up to 30 alphanumeric characters, alongside a tax area code and a tax liable setting, and VAT clauses cover the explanatory exemption text printed on a document. Microsoft's Business Central library documents no certificate record, no attachment, and no expiry date behind that field. That matters because liability for an invalid certificate falls back on the seller at audit. Commenda collects certificates through a self-service portal that can carry your branding, validates each one at upload, applies it automatically in the states where it is valid, accepts multi-state SST and MTC forms alongside single-state ones, and chases expiries before an auditor finds them.

Natively, and with real reports behind it. It calculates VAT from posting setups that combine a VAT business posting group with a VAT product posting group, and you set the VAT percent on each combination. Reverse charge on B2B sales to VAT-liable companies in other EU countries is handled through those same setups, and EU VAT registration number validation is free in the product. For reporting there is an EC Sales List report, which Microsoft says works only for countries and regions in the EU and exports a VIES XML file, plus a VAT Return report and country-specific VAT-VIES declarations and Intrastat in several localizations. Commenda covers EU VAT including OSS and IOSS, and files rather than exports.

On your side yes, on ours no. Microsoft documents extra steps for on-premises Making Tax Digital: a VAT report configuration built from four separate codeunits, edits to the VAT report setup, and an app registration in Azure to produce the client ID, secret, and redirect URL. Online, the HMRC service connection handles most of that for you. For Commenda the data path is the same either way. A native Business Central connector is on our roadmap. Today the transactions come in as a mapped import, with fields for transaction date, amount, ship-to state, and zip, plus optional invoice, shipping, and handling, or through a custom connection to our REST API. We do the mapping, so there is no engineering work on your side.