McCaffrey’s stocks up on tax compliance confidence with Avalara MatrixMaster

Jim McCaffrey III and his son, Jim McCaffrey IV, opened their first food market in North East Philadelphia in 1980. Today there are eight McCaffrey’s locations across southeast Pennsylvania and central New Jersey. Their stores have up to 60,000 different items on the shelves at any given time, and more than 100,000 in their point-of-sale (POS) system.

Managing tens of thousands of varying items along with changing taxability rates is difficult enough. But manually managing them all across two states? The chances of getting tax rates wrong are high.

“We want to do the right thing,” says Ben Norton, who is in charge of retail technology for McCaffrey’s Food Markets. “We want to make sure our customers are taxed — or not taxed — correctly. But it was really a guessing game for our small team.”

Ben knew things had to change when McCaffrey’s got hit with a fine during a state audit. “We decided to fine-tune the process,” he says, “and to automate it as much as possible.”

Avalara MatrixMaster is a niche service designed to solve product taxability problems like those at McCaffrey’s. Retail businesses can track and apply thousands of sales tax rates based on individual SKUs using the MatrixMaster database of more than 15 million codes. They can then apply the correct rate for each product, in each jurisdiction, at the time of sale.