Otelier and Avalara now check your PMS tax rates against the real ones, daily

Hotel tax configuration errors usually surface during an audit, months after the money was collected at the wrong rate. A new integration between Otelier and Avalara, announced on 13 October, is built to catch them the next morning instead.

The connection links Avalara's tax calculation and compliance service with Otelier Rec, Otelier's finance and accounting product. Both companies call it an industry first for two-way tax data in hotels.

How the data moves

Daily revenue summaries and exemption details pass from Otelier Rec to Avalara, which then prepares, files and remits sales and lodging tax returns.

The return leg is the part that matters operationally. Avalara's verified tax rates are compared against the rates actually applied in the property management system. Where they differ, the discrepancy appears in Rec as a variance for somebody to correct before filing rather than after.

Otelier has also added a workflow that forces a reason to be recorded against every tax-exempt line item. That is the documentation auditors ask for, and the thing most properties end up reconstructing from memory.

Numbers and names

Otelier says it serves more than 10,000 hotels worldwide. Avalara says it handles more than 54 billion AvaTax API calls a year.

Russell Meek, Senior Director of Product at Otelier, framed the goal as letting operators validate tax data daily and cut manual work. Nicole Rogers, General Manager of Lodging at Avalara, described it as automating filing and remittance while checking tax positions in advance.

Availability

The integration is complete and certified. One hotel management company, unnamed, is piloting it, and it is now open to other hotel companies. Neither company has published pricing.

What it means for operators

The useful part here is not the filing automation, which plenty of vendors sell. It is the daily variance report between what your PMS charged and what the rate should have been.

Lodging tax is where PMS configuration quietly rots. Rates change by municipality, a new fee gets set up in the wrong bucket, an exemption is applied too broadly, and nobody notices because the PMS keeps doing exactly what it was told. Under-collection comes out of your margin when it is finally assessed. Over-collection is a refund liability and, in some jurisdictions, a penalty on top.

The honest caveat is that this only helps if you run Otelier Rec. For everyone else the announcement is a prompt rather than a product. The check it performs, comparing your PMS tax setup against an authoritative rate source, is one you can run manually against your own jurisdictions, and most properties have not done it since the last rate change.

Worth knowing too that this sits beside the PMS rather than inside it. The PMS remains the system that collects the tax and holds the applied rate. Nothing here changes that, so a wrong rate still goes out the door on the day. You just find out tomorrow instead of in two years.