Congratulations Lizzy Lift: October’s Gimme 5 Spotlight Customer

Congratulations Lizzy Lift: October’s Gimme 5 Spotlight Customer

There’s no doubt in Mandy Guetzow’s mind that Avalara has made life easier at Lizzy Lift, the material handling equipment rental company where she works as the accounting supervisor.

On average, automating sales tax with Avalara saves small businesses five hours each week, but Guetzow says it’s probably saved Lizzy Lift even more — at least eight hours. With the extra time, she says, the company is going paperless and “focusing on fine-tuning our billing process, since our co-worker has the time to think about more than just billing and checking sales tax.”

Just before Guetzow started working at Lizzy Lift, the company started using Avalara. Until then, sales tax was calculated manually: “Our billing department was one person. Every time she was billing, she was going to the state website and double checking — sometimes, the rates and taxability change, so she was going to every state, entering the address, making sure the rate hadn’t changed, then billing it out.”

Not every employee was ready to dive right into automation, says Guetzow. “At first, we were nervous — what if Avalara didn’t have the right rate information? We were double checking and all that. Now, it saves a lot of time. We don’t have to worry about updating all the counties and cities, which could be a full-time job in and of itself.”

With that time savings, Guetzow says, “we can focus on other things and improve other processes because Avalara has allowed us to spend less time checking taxes.”

Once skeptical of automation, Guetzow’s mind has been changed. “I would absolutely 100% recommend that as much as someone can automate, they should do it … everybody has seen the value that Avalara has added to our company.”

After being awarded the $5,000 Gimme 5 Customer Spotlight prize, Lizzy Lift decided to give back to the people who’ve made the company great: its employees. On October 4, they celebrated with a company-wide party, complete with Avalara swag.

Like Lizzy Lift’s success story? Each month, with Avalara’s new Gimme 5 program, we’re asking Avalara customers to tell us how they use the five extra hours they get back every week by automating sales tax — and how they’d spend $5,000 to make their business better.

Winners receive $5,000 cash for their business, a free year of AvaTax or TrustFile, and a customer spotlight profile on the high-traffic Avalara.com website. If you’d like to see your company featured next, enter at http://www.info.avalara.com/Gimme5 today.