Berkshire Blanket & Home Co. gets cushy with sales tax automation

“It gets complicated quickly, especially for a core business that is all about wholesale,” she explains. “In no time we were adding new warehouses, doing more business through Amazon.com, and adding remote employees in new states — all of which further complicated our tax obligations.”

When the company switched to a new ecommerce platform, Emily knew the old sales tax matrix had reached the end of its useful life. “We had to find a new system to manage the tax,” she says.

It didn’t take Emily long to land on Avalara’s suite of products as the right solution; she had used it in a previous role at a different company. “AvaTax, in particular, is the Cadillac of its category, and has been for years,” she says. “It’s what you should be using if you just want tax handled.”

And Berkshire’s complexity didn’t end with tax determination and calculation. A critical compliance challenge for its wholesale business relates to the collection, storage, management, and renewal of its exemption certificates. Berkshire added Avalara CertCapture to AvaTax to automate these business processes as well.

Avalara products integrate well with the company’s ecommerce and order management systems.

“It’s absolutely seamless. In fact, we recently changed our ecommerce platform system to Shopify Plus. A key factor in that decision was that it features built-in integration with Avalara’s software,” Emily explains. ”We just set it up once and forget it. And Avalara was more of a partner than we expected during the transition, offering us the support we needed.”

Emily speaks energetically about mitigating risk, lowering the stress levels of her team, and the peace of mind Avalara has given them. But an even greater impact is what Avalara has made possible for the company’s future.

“We have some very audacious growth plans,” she says. “The kind of volume we’re planning will rely 100% on Avalara’s ability to help us scale. I can honestly say that having Avalara will enable that kind of growth, because we know we’re covered.”