We audit the file you have, identify which certificates won’t survive an audit, and put the right platform in place to collect, validate, and renew the rest automatically. We don’t resell software — we know which of these systems fits how you already work, and we configure it around that.
Taxability is arguable. Nexus is arguable. A missing certificate is a yes-or-no question, and the burden of proof is entirely yours. That’s why it’s where an auditor looks first, and why it’s our most common finding.
Your customer told you they were exempt. That isn’t the standard. If you can’t produce a valid certificate, the state assesses the tax against you — and you’re the one who has to decide whether to go back and bill a customer from three years ago.
Unsigned, undated, wrong form, wrong state, expired, or an exemption reason that doesn’t match what was actually sold. Each of those is a certificate that exists and still fails.
Some accept the multistate uniform form, some require their own, some accept a blanket certificate and some want one per transaction. Florida wants an annual renewal. Colorado home-rule cities need their own.
A certificate that was valid when you filed it away isn’t valid forever. Nobody gets a reminder. The gap is discovered in an audit, by which point the exempt sales in between are taxable ones.
Certificates in a shared drive can’t stop your tax engine from charging an exempt customer, or stop it from exempting one whose certificate lapsed. Both directions cost you.
Asking a customer for paperwork sits awkwardly between sales and accounting. Sales doesn’t want the friction; accounting doesn’t have the relationship. So it waits.
Certificate management is a solved problem in software — several platforms will chase your customers, validate what comes back, and flag expiries. What they won’t do is tell you which of them suits your ERP, your billing flow, and where your business is heading in three years.
That’s our part. We license the platform that fits, implement it around your systems, and set the validation rules to the states you actually sell into. We take no commission from any vendor, so “the cheaper one is fine for you” is a sentence we can afford to say.
Then we stay on hand for the judgment calls — the multistate form that doesn’t cover the state, the exemption reason that doesn’t match what you sold. Those are accounting questions, not software questions.
The difference is rarely dramatic. It’s a missing date, a form from the wrong state, or an exemption reason that doesn’t cover what you sold. In an audit, that’s the whole distance between an exempt sale and an assessed one.
Unsigned, or signed by someone with no authority to sign
A multistate form that doesn’t list the state where the sale happened
Expired — often silently, in a state with an annual renewal rule
“Resale” claimed on a purchase the customer clearly consumed themselves
A state form where the jurisdiction is a home-rule city with its own requirement
A permit number that doesn’t validate against the state’s registry
The form that specific state accepts, complete in every field
Signed and dated by an authorized person at the customer
Permit number verified against the state registry where that’s available
An exemption reason consistent with what they actually buy from you
Local jurisdiction covered where the state doesn’t cover it
Tracked to its expiry date and renewed before it passes
Set your annual exempt sales and how much of it you believe is properly documented. The gap is what an auditor would assess, plus penalty and interest.
Illustrative. Applies a three-year audit period, a 25% combined penalty, and 8% annual interest to the undocumented portion. Most businesses overestimate how much of their file is valid — an audit of an existing file typically finds a meaningful share unusable.
A certificate only does its job if the systems around it know it exists.
We wire validated certificates into your tax engine, so exempt customers stop being charged and lapsed ones stop being exempted.
If certificates are already being disallowed, collecting replacements mid-audit is one of the fastest ways to move the number.
Exempt sales still get reported on the return. We handle both sides of that.
Software will chase a customer and check a form has a date on it. It will not tell you whether a multistate form covers the state you shipped to, or whether “resale” is credible for what that customer bought.
Those questions come to us, and they are answered by accountants who have defended the same exemptions in audits.
The platform does, in your name and on your branding — automated requests, the correct form for the state, and follow-ups until it arrives. We configure that flow and set the tone; your sales team never has to make the ask.
Storage is the easy part. The questions that matter are whether each document is valid in that state, whether it’s still current, and whether every exempt customer has one. An ERP folder answers none of those.
Often, yes. States generally allow certificates to be produced during the audit, and every one recovered removes a sale from the assessment. It depends entirely on whether the customer can still be reached — which is why the day the notice arrives matters.
You do, day to day — it’s your platform, licensed through us and configured around your systems. We handle selection, implementation, the rules per state, and the judgment calls when a document is questionable. Pricing is the platform licence plus our setup work, and it’s small relative to what one disallowed exemption schedule costs.
We’ll review your existing certificates and tell you which ones would survive an audit. Most clients are surprised, and it’s better to be surprised now.
