Managing sales tax complexity was a full-time job with high turnover. “We had to have someone dedicated almost full time to watching the rules in each county, municipality, and state where we sell,” says Barb Mika, who supervises sales accounting for the company. “The error rate was very sizable ... we had been audited quite a few times.”
Oxbo was managing sales tax through its ERP system, which was tedious and time-consuming. “We had to do all of the research into each state’s tax laws that apply to agriculture,” says Barb. “Then add each jurisdiction individually into our disparate systems and link them together … the setup was quite horrific for each state. Our systems really confined us.”
Without an automated system in place to manage exemption certificates, audits were especially challenging. “Some of the certificates were very old, some got lost … we didn’t have a process in place to ask clients for updated forms,” Barb explains. As the company’s customer base grew rapidly, the problem was exacerbated.
