Tenth Revolution Group uses AvaTax to automate and streamline its US sales tax

Tenth Revolution Group is a global leader in staffing for IT professionals. The business provides its clients with permanent and contract talent solutions. As a multi-million pound business dealing with cross-border sales in multiple states across the US as well as in Canada, the company needs to ensure that the correct sales taxes are applied to invoices. Its accounting system couldn’t accommodate the thousands of alternative tax jurisdictions and rates in North America.

The firm’s tax department knew that it needed to find an automated solution that would be able to automatically calculate the tax that’s due on an order, taking care of origin-based or destination-based taxes that could change state to state, and pull the information into a tax return, reducing the risks of penalties for incorrect tax filings and payments.

Before partnering with Avalara, Tenth Revolution Group was managing its tax compliance manually. This meant that each invoice would have to have sales tax manually calculated and added, and involved manually manipulating historic data to file tax returns. Not only was this a labour intensive and mundane process, but it also meant that there was always a risk of human error.

The firm collects sales tax across 10 states and also GST, HST and PST across Canada, which meant its teams were having to try to manage many different tax rates across different jurisdictions with regularly changing rates. With the business growing at around 30-40% a year, the sheer volume of invoices and the manual work involved meant that an automated solution was needed. So the team decided to look for the right partner to help them.

Charging the wrong rate on an invoice can mean potentially damaging your relationship with clients. In an industry such as recruitment that’s very much built on relationships, that can mean losing valuable sources of repeat revenue. Any mistakes on tax returns would also expose Tenth Revolution Group to potentially having to cover any missing or incorrect tax itself, as well as the risk of fines if a tax filing was incorrect.

So, the tax team at Tenth Revolution Group decided that they needed to find a tax engine that could help them and knew that they wanted to find a solution that could link automatically and easily to their Sage X3 ERP. They looked for an approved partner from Sage to ensure that integration would be quicker Avalara’s cloud-based AvaTax was on their shortlist and with Avalara’s strong reputation in the market and prebuilt Sage X3 connector, it quickly became the preferred solution.

Once they had made sure that AvaTax met all their needs and they were satisfied with all the technical and security aspects, implementation was simple. The team at Avalara worked with Tenth Revolution Group’s tax department to ensure that everything went smoothly. Once the solution had been successfully implemented, all the work to keep tax rates up to date, produce accurate calculations and generate a real-time automated determination could be managed by AvaTax for every invoice.