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Avalara is preparing to offer sales tax certification to accountants. The Bainbridge Island, Wash.-based sales-and-use tax vendor says the program stemmed from the alliances it has created with state CPA societies and accounting firm associations. Ray Bigley, the company’s VP of business and corporate development compared the upcoming education opportunities to Intuit’s ProAdvisor designation.

“There will be a different levels of certification for sales tax by Avalara,” says Bigley. The levels would start by providing talking points to accountants interested in learning about sales tax and scale up to such things as instruction on installing Avalara on products such as QuickBooks and NetSuite. There will be exams to test applicants.

The offering, scheduled for introduction next month, grew out of requests by state societies. So far, Avalara has established alliances with the Kansas and Maryland societies. It has similar arrangements with PrimeGlobal, MooreStephens and AGN International-North America,

Avalara places a link on the websites of its partners that visitors can use to sign up for the Accountants Resource Center, an online repository of information about sales tax. In particular, it provides information on the Marketplace Fairness Act of 2013. Bigley notes that besides offering information, Avalara is also speaking at these organizations to tell accountants how they could be affected by changes in laws regarding sales taxes.

CPAs do not need to be experts in these taxes. However, “they need to have a resource and they need to have a way to answer questions in professional manner,” Bigley says. As clients increasingly feel the impact of the Marketplace Fairness Act, they are turning to their accounting advisors. “As a CPA you don’t want to be caught without an answer,” Bigley continues.

Bigley says CPAs have been calling Avalara for more information, after visiting the resource center, although he says that was not the purpose for establishing the relationship

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