Sales Tax Software Company Receives Patent

A Northwest Arkansas software company earlier this month received one of only 15 sales tax-related patents ever issued by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

Sales Tax DataLINK in Bentonville, where Wal-Mart is also headquartered, made history with its new patent for sales tax software and its straightforward title “System and Method for Tax Filing, Data Processing, Data Verification and Reconciliation.”

“Sales tax compliance becomes more sophisticated and complex every day, so businesses need new technologies to stay ahead of these challenges,” said Noel Hamm, CEO of Sales Tax DataLINK. “The new era of filing software needs to safeguard businesses and accounting firms that want to be certain their sales taxes are being collected and remitted in the most accurate way.”

A U.S. patent is only granted when the patented system is something truly new and different from what others are doing. Sales tax-related patents in the past were granted for such important work as enabling electronic cash registers to calculate the sales tax rate that should be applied to a purchase (in 1976) and a system that can calculate the sales tax that should be applied to a purchase based on its UPC code (in 2010).

“Sales Tax DataLINK is first and foremost a tax-filing software company, producing a suite of sales and use tax tools that engage sales tax analytics,” Hamm said. “Our software brings an unprecedented visibility and patterning to your tax data that eliminates the error gap from invoicing to tax filing.”

The patent was awarded on the basis of innovative technology that gives companies the ability to evaluate the health of their sales tax systems and to make educated corrections resulting in more accurate tax filing each month, Hamm said. Other sales tax software merely populates forms with no means of automatically validating the numbers.

Northwest Arkansas is a place where “technology and talent marry,” Hamm said.

“Business mentors like Jeff Amerine at Innovate Arkansas create networks of really smart people and people here are willing to help one another find business success,” Hamm said. “People here share ideas, and this is a place where thought leaders bring business-changing solutions to fruition.”

“In today’s challenging business climate, the old way no longer works. Just accepting unsubstantiated numbers on a tax return is a thing of the past,” Hamm said.