Tax & Compliance
Sales & Use Tax
Sales tax is the obligation businesses most often discover too late.
Sales tax has a particular character among tax obligations: you are collecting someone else’s money and holding it in trust. States treat failures accordingly, and the personal liability provisions mean owners and officers can be assessed individually.
It is also the obligation that businesses most often acquire without noticing.
Nexus, since Wayfair
Before 2018, a business generally owed sales tax only where it had physical presence. That is no longer true.
Most states now assert economic nexus — a filing obligation triggered purely by sales volume into the state, commonly around $100,000 or 200 transactions. An e-commerce seller in Lake Mary can accumulate obligations in a dozen states without ever leaving Florida.
We map your actual footprint against each state’s thresholds and tell you where you are registered, where you should be, and where you are approaching a threshold.
Fixing exposure you already have
If a business has been selling into a state without registering, back tax has been accruing, and interest with it.
The productive response is a voluntary disclosure agreement. Approach the state proactively and most will limit the lookback to three or four years and abate penalties. Wait until they find you, and the lookback is typically unlimited with penalties attached.
The arithmetic strongly favours getting ahead of it.
Taxability is stranger than it looks
Whether a given item is taxable is not intuitive, particularly in the sectors we work in most.
Grocery is a good example. Unprepared food is frequently exempt while prepared food is taxable, and the line between them turns on details like whether utensils were provided or whether the item was heated. For a supermarket running thousands of SKUs, getting the mapping right at the point-of-sale level is the whole game — and getting it wrong compounds silently across every transaction.
We review taxability by category and make sure the POS or invoicing system reflects it.
Exemption certificates
If you sell to resellers or exempt organisations, the exemption is only as good as the certificate on file.
Auditors ask for certificates. Missing ones convert exempt sales into taxable ones, retroactively, with the tax assessed against you rather than the customer. We put a collection and renewal process in place so the file is complete before anyone asks to see it.
Common questions
We only have one location. Can we owe tax in other states?
Yes. Since Wayfair, most states impose economic nexus based purely on sales volume or transaction count into that state — commonly around $100,000 in sales. No physical presence is required.
We think we should have registered somewhere and did not. What now?
A voluntary disclosure agreement is usually the answer. It typically limits the lookback period and abates penalties, provided you approach the state before it approaches you.
Florida has no income tax. Does sales tax still apply?
Very much so. Florida's sales and use tax is a significant obligation and the Department of Revenue is active in enforcing it, particularly for retail and grocery.
Are our products even taxable?
It varies by state and by category in ways that are genuinely counterintuitive — grocery items, prepared food, software and services are all treated inconsistently across states. Taxability review is part of the engagement.
Often paired with
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