LAZ Parking curbs compliance risk with Avalara

LAZ Parking, founded in Hartford, Connecticut in 1981, is one of the largest and fastest-growing parking companies in the United States. They operate over 1.2 million parking spaces, in over 3,100 locations, across 35 states. With four decades of experience providing parking management, transportation, and mobility services, LAZ works seamlessly across a variety of market segments, including hospitality and valet, office buildings, medical, airport and transportation, campus, government and municipal, retail, events, residential buildings, and shuttle services.

LAZ Parking’s growth has skyrocketed in recent years, both organically and by acquisition, increasing the workload and complexity of the company’s business licensing requirements at multiple jurisdictional levels. The volume of necessary licenses, permits, and fees was exacerbated by the rapid addition of new lines of business.

“Fortunately, we have good relationships with most of the authorities we deal with,” says Heather Parker, compliance officer. “But in some of our biggest markets, there’s no tolerance for being out of compliance. They’ll just shut you down.”

LAZ Parking has a department of just two people who are in charge of managing the business licensing requirements for the entire nation. To keep up with the company’s substantial growth, it was apparent that putting the proper systems and processes in place would be critical. Heather and her colleague, Sarah Parente, started organizing required licenses and permits with an Excel spreadsheet, eventually graduating to storing documents in a homegrown database. While better at storing licenses, their database was limited on what it could provide in terms of reporting, notifications, and more. “It wasn’t doing what we needed it to do. We weren’t really managing the licenses — it was just a place to put them,” Heather admits.

“I had been asking for a solution like this for 10 years,” Heather laughs. “Now that we’ve expanded into some cities that are highly regulated and heavily enforced, and with all of our acquisitions, we’ve become a big target. So, last year I went to our CFO and said, ‘we’re doing it.’”

Several factors landed Avalara License Management (ALM) on the short list for LAZ Parking. The fact ALM is cloud-based was a big selling point. “Because we run lean here, we didn’t want our IT people to take on any part of this system. In the end, we only had to provide our data and Avalara did the rest. The project management and transition team were great,” says Heather.

Before the project was completed, LAZ Parking also instituted a customization to manage their bonding work. With ALM, they were able to streamline their sprawling business license portfolios into one secure database and maintain them with workflow tools tailored to their needs in a collaborative environment. Heather and Sarah are now able to ensure the company’s ongoing compliance with a dynamic calendar and reclaim time they’d been wasting on repetitive tasks.