BRANY International reaps the benefits of sales tax automation

Biomedical Research Alliance of New York (BRANY) offers services to help scientific sponsors and investigators conduct efficient clinical trials and board or committee reviews. At its founding, BRANY worked primarily with hospitals and academic medical centers in the greater New York City area, but now partners with teams and organizations across the United States.

A couple of key acquisitions moved the organization into online education in the clinical and social behavioral research space, as well as on-site and remote consulting for research compliance programs. With new services came new geographic markets and new complexity, especially around taxability.

“Those two acquisitions made us national,” says Executive Vice President and CFO Joanne Nicholson. “Suddenly we were selling online courses all over the country and we had consultants in several states.”

In a very short period of time, BRANY went from being registered for sales tax in one state to 28 states. Since different states tax services differently, Joanne knew that BRANY needed a solution to streamline the process of sales tax calculation and mitigate risk. Programming BRANY’s in-house ecommerce system to do the calculations would be difficult and wouldn’t ensure the accuracy they needed.

“We talked to several people, including our auditors, and the first name everyone mentioned was Avalara,” Joanne recalls. “One of my colleagues used Avalara in a previous company, so we really trusted that recommendation. Once we looked at the pricing and did some calculations, we knew Avalara was the right fit.”

BRANY needed Avalara AvaTax to integrate with its ecommerce system, as well as QuickBooks Desktop, which the company uses to invoice for online education services. “The QuickBooks integration was very, very easy,” says Joanne. “We got it done in two meetings, and the only reason we needed two was because we had to get through the firewalls of a third-party provider that hosts all our IT functions.”

Integrating with BRANY’s ecommerce system took a little longer. According to Joanne, “We had to look at all of our services and carefully map them to each state’s taxability requirements. For example, West Virginia considers online education taxable unless it has a continuing education (CE) designation. We have courses that have CE accreditation, and courses that don’t. Making sure those kinds of customizations were done the right way was important up-front work we had to do, and the Avalara team was very helpful in providing guidance along the way. After that, the technical integration was very simple.”