ProviNET Solutions mitigates the risks of rapid growth

ProviNET Solutions is a wholly owned subsidiary of a large, senior living provider. Their tailored technology services range from consulting to managed IT services to virtual private cloud hosting.

Based in the Chicagoland area, ProviNET’s customers not only include regional businesses, but hundreds of nonprofits all over the United States. What started as an in-house IT department for its parent company has grown into a thriving business in its own right, and that growth has been accelerating.

As ProviNET expanded both its geographic footprint and its offerings, the company’s sales tax obligations grew more complex, making compliance harder to maintain. The manual processes for calculating sales tax and managing exemptions became too risky and too onerous.

“It was an arduous task,” says Barb Cullinan, who leads business services at ProviNET. It was her job to take the transaction information from their ConnectWise ERP and push the sales tax to Microsoft Dynamics GP. Each month, she reconciled the two systems, making sure everything taxable was being taxed and everything exempt was not. To make things even more complicated, ProviNET is also a reseller with use tax liability.

“As our organization sold products or performed services for customers out of state I would occasionally find discrepancies,” Barb remembers, “and then I had to spend time searching for the source and making corrections.” If, for example, a tax-exempt customer had mistakenly been charged sales tax, Barb was on the hook for figuring out where the process went wrong.

The greatest compliance risk was how the company managed its exemption certificates. “I kept them in a large binder on my desk,” laughs Barb. “And I once had someone print out a spreadsheet to help me keep track of who was tax exempt and why ... that was a little messy.”

In the summer of 2016, ProviNET upgraded to a newer version of Microsoft Dynamics GP, which paved the way for a system that could automate both sales tax calculation and exemption management.

The company chose Avalara AvaTax to automate sales tax calculation and Avalara CertCapture for managing exemption certificates and compliance, based largely on Avalara’s ability to integrate easily with existing ERP and accounting systems.

From start to finish, the Avalara implementation took less than three months. “It was a very smooth process,” says Barb, “a breeze compared to implementations I’ve gone through in the past. My Avalara implementation manager was with me every step of the way, making sure the various systems communicated clearly and reliably with each other.”

AvaTax has helped ProviNET do away with potentially risky manual processes for calculating and applying sales tax. “I rarely have to spend any time looking for the source of a discrepancy,” says Barb.

On the exemptions front, CertCapture has made Barb’s binder obsolete. Once an exemption certificate is loaded into the system, CertCapture manages renewals and communicates with AvaTax automatically. “I still have the binder on my desk, though,” Barb laughs. “It’s like a souvenir now.”