CASE STUDY 1

The Company:

Since 1950, this customer has been a leading distributor of cleaning products, shipping supplies, and floor maintenance machines. The firm also provides training courses, facility reviews, and equipment repair services. Most of their sales were tax-exempt, B2B (business-to-business).

The Challenge:

The company’s short-staffed tax team struggled with a burdensome compliance process, because tax rates were not in real-time, only being batch-uploaded on occasion. With taxability rules changing frequently from state to state, manually monitoring, correcting taxations, and many other errors led to time-consuming phone calls, emails, credits, and rebills. Not to mention tax return filing that had to be manually cobbled together from disparate systems creating error-prone transaction data. This distributor struggled with manually managing hundreds of vendors and exemption certificates, and then along came the PANDEMIC. Sales dropped, driving the desperate launch of an e-commerce portal to ensure business continuity. The resulting sales in new states triggered economic nexus thresholds. Their tired tax team was unprepared to keep up with the new compliance obligations, putting this leading distributor at even greater audit risk, and increasing the need to hire another accountant.

The Solution:

Avalara's professional services' tax experts performed a nexus assessment that uncovered the company's need to register in 15 new states, which Avalara handled on behalf of the company to eliminate their compliance and audit risk concerns. AvaTax's proven-solid integration into their Infor ERP provided multi-line-item taxability, real-time guaranteed-accurate tax rates, and automated returns processing ensured accurate payment of tax liabilities, and CertCapture ensured that there were no missing, expired, or invalid exemption certificates.

Avalara improved the utilization of their valuable accounting staff so they could work on more strategic, revenue-generating projects. No more support headaches, no more manual errors, a reduction in audit risk, and no need to hire another accountant!

The Company:

Headquartered in Mount Vernon, NY, this manufacturer has 3 divisions. The first division is B type materials (think military-grade metals for accessories like dog tags, etc). The second division does promotional products like dog tags, challenge coins, etc. The 3rd division does custom t-shirts, masks, and PPE. They currently have 122 Employees - $24 MIL Revenue.

The Challenge:

This manufacturer was registered in NY but learned that they are about to cross the economic thresholds for multiple states due to COVID-19 and the increased sales of masks and PPE. They have received notices from California triggering a reaction to get compliant in all states. They learned that they triggered economic nexus in 35 additional states and needed to get registered as soon as possible. They also maintain over 500 exemptions that were not current. They need to automate as much as possible because they only have one person managing tax compliance.

The Solution:

• Integration to both an Infor ERP and BigCommerce
• Avalara Registrations to register in states needed
• Streamlined Sales Tax (SST) program to reduce the overall cost
• Avatax sales tax determination
• CertCapture – Exemption Certificate Management
• Returns Filing
• Avalara Tax Research Tool to accurately set up and maintain tax matrix
• Managed Services to import, validate, and verify exemption certificates on file

The Result:

The customer is now completely automated, giving them confidence in tax compliance moving forward. Economic nexus in all states where they sell a minimum threshold of revenue and/or transactions. Now they can focus on continuing their growth.

The Company:

A supplier of fabricated steel equipment to large foodservice firms such as Starbucks, Subway, and Walmart.

The Challenge:

This supplier needed to find a better way to handle tax compliance. The supplier’s legacy tax software was incompatible with their ERP. This led to:

• The required upgrade to the latest Infor ERP version without having a pre-built, certified, fully-functional connector
• The reliance upon a labor-intensive, error-prone manual processes
• Inaccurate customer addresses
• Uncertainty around product and service taxability, as well as nexus
• Increased audit risk

The Solution:

Avalara offerings were a perfect match to solve all of their challenges.

• Proven integration – Crossroads RMC’s certified connectors to Avalara are top-notch and time-proven
• Improved employee utilization – Accounting staff can now focus on more valuable, revenue-generating activities
• AvaTax reports changes in tax rules and nexus obligations, eliminating the need for manual monitoring
• Avalara Consumer Use facilitates the time-consuming burden of use tax reporting
• Avalara’s Managed Returns automates returns filing and payments
• CertCapture streamlines the collection and management of exemption certificates
• Reduced audit risk – With Avalara in use, auditors can focus on firms who don’t have a compliance plan in place
• AvaTax delivers guaranteed-accurate address validation and tax rates
• Returns ensures that all liabilities get paid on time, down to local jurisdictions
• CertCapture safeguards against missing, out-of-date and inaccurate exemption certs