All-around automation with Elettric80 and Avalara

Based in Viano, Italy, Elettric80 designs and builds robotic warehouse machinery, laser-driven forklifts, high-density storage systems, and the software to run it all. When they opened a U.S. subsidiary in Skokie, Illinois, the company experienced tremendous growth, quickly.

The small administrative team in Skokie was stretched thin managing exemption certificates, returns, the ever-changing database of sales tax rates, and changes resulting from customer mergers and acquisitions.

“It was getting difficult for us to keep up with the changes in sales tax,” says Julie Meredith, director of accounting and administration at Elettric80. “It was a fairly manual process, and we were hoping to take some of that extra work from our administrative team — setting up new customers’ tax rates, managing the database of tax rates, managing exemption certificates, staying current on tax rules in the U.S. and in Canada. A few times we learned about a change in tax rates from a customer, or because our numbers were off when we filed a return. As you grow, mistakes like that become more expensive.”

“Our main requirement was for the solution to be cloud-based,” says Luciano Spotti, the company’s IT manager. “I didn’t want anything we had to install on-site, because we are focused on reducing the internal effort required to maintain IT solutions.”

“We’re not selling a million different SKUs, so we didn’t want something super complex,” adds Julie. “We really just needed something to automate the process, make it more objective, and be easy to use.”

Based on those requirements, and the need to integrate the solution with SAP, the team chose Avalara, who brought in DuCharme, McMillen & Associates (DMA), a partner with expertise in SAP integration.

Once the team decided on Avalara, the implementation moved quickly. “I think we had two meetings,” Luciano recalls. “One to sign the Avalara contract in early November, and a second one to talk with DMA a week later about configuration and project scheduling. It only took us a few days to get SAP set up for the integration because it was basically just Julie and me making decisions. It was a very short process.”

After testing the systems internally for a few weeks, Elettric80 went live with Avalara AvaTax, Avalara Returns, and Avalara CertCapture. 

Keeping up with changing tax rates is no longer a manual effort, and compliance is no longer the risk it once was. “Hands down, the most important thing is knowing that we’re compliant. It helps me sleep better at night,” says Julie.

The company also uses AvaTax to calculate use tax. Prior to Avalara, the team would review vendor invoices and accrue any use tax that should have been applied but was not. And with AvaTax, expanding into new states has become a matter of a few clicks.