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!