MLM Software Company in Texas

The Texas question is a fifty-state question

Almost nothing about running a direct selling company here is specific to Texas. What is specific is the consequence of shipping nationally from a single base: tax obligations in states you have never visited, product restrictions that differ by state, and disclosure duties that vary.

We have no Texas office and no local staff. The federal position — retail classification, income disclosure, income claim controls, contractor reporting — is on the US page.

Economic nexus, plainly

Since the 2018 South Dakota v. Wayfair decision a state can require you to collect sales tax based on economic activity alone, with no physical presence. Thresholds are set per state, in revenue, transaction count, or both, and they change.

Two consequences:

1. Calculation is destination-based and goes through a tax provider. There are thousands of local taxing jurisdictions in the US; the rate depends on where the parcel goes, and a rate table somebody maintains by hand is wrong within a quarter.
2. Nexus is monitored rather than estimated. Revenue and transaction counts tracked per state against that state’s threshold, with an alert as one approaches. That turns registration into a decision your accountant makes on time, rather than something discovered during an audit with back-tax attached.

Where a marketplace collects on your behalf, those orders are recorded distinctly so the same order is not reported twice. The accounting page covers how tax and commission reconcile into the general ledger.

The mechanic that keeps tax out of the plan

This is the part that gets left implicit, and it is the reason a tax problem becomes a commission problem.

Commissionable volume is never derived from an order total. It is a separate value, held per product and variant, set as a plan decision:

• Commissionable and qualifying volume held separately, because they answer different questions.
• Tax and shipping excluded by construction, not by subtraction.
• Zero set explicitly for shipping upgrades, gift vouchers, samples and any non-commissionable line — because undefined volume is a payout decision made by default, and default is not a decision.

Compute volume as a percentage of the invoice and then subtract tax and shipping, and the resulting number moves with tax rates, promotions and freight surcharges. Every one of those movements is a change to the plan that nobody approved and that a distributor will eventually spot across two periods. The ecommerce page sets out the volume model in full.

Product restrictions have two halves

A product that cannot ship to a state is not orderable there. That is the obvious half.

The half that gets missed: it must also not contribute volume there. Enforce availability without resolving volume per market and you eventually have a distributor who qualified on an order that was never fulfilled, which is a correction against a rank that has already been announced.

So availability and volume resolution are one configuration rather than two. The same mechanism handles a product cleared in the US and not in a second country, which is why the arrangement is worth getting right before you need it — see the Florida page for the cross-border version of the same problem.

State disclosure and enrolment gating

A number of states regulate business opportunity offers and require registration or disclosure before a participant pays a fee. Whether your offer falls within any of them is a question for counsel in each state.

What the platform does is mechanical and cheap:

• hold the current disclosure document per state,
• record which version each applicant received, and when,
• block enrolment in a state you have not yet cleared.

The third control is the one that pays for itself, because a gap found retrospectively is a gap in a record that cannot be created after the fact.

Working with us from Texas

Calls in Central Time, which overlaps most of the US working day and the tail of ours in South Africa. Named technical lead in the statement of work. For a migration, the acceptance test is a closed period recomputed and reconciled line by line against what you actually paid, as a contractual criterion rather than a demonstration.

The engagement page covers timelines and cost, and how to evaluate a development partner covers the eight checks worth running on us.