History
“Nothing in this world is so powerful as an idea whose time has come.”
— Victor Hugo
In 1999, business visionary Rory Rawlings was searching for a way to unleash his entrepreneurial spirit. Calling on his expertise as a CPA, software developer and integrator of enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, he founded Advantage Solutions, Inc., an ERP implementation and development consulting company. While striving to meet his clients’ needs, Rory quickly discovered that many of them lacked an efficient and affordable way to calculate, manage and remit sales and use taxes. Instead, they were forced to rely on cumbersome, time-consuming and often error-prone manual processes.
At the time, plenty of businesses were using services to automate their payroll processes, but the concept of doing the same for calculating and processing sales taxes simply didn’t exist. Rory had a vision: Take advantage of Internet technologies to provide sales tax automation solutions to small and medium-sized businesses that couldn’t afford the expensive enterprise solutions available at the time.
Eager for partners who shared this vision, Rory was soon joined by Jared Vogt and Scott McFarlane, and in 2004 Advantage Solutions became Avalara. “We were a great combination,” CEO Scott McFarlane reflects. “Rory was the product strategist and made sure we produced the best tax engine and the most innovative technology. I was the business driver and the evangelist of our innovative approach, and Jared was the Internet guru who helped shape the business in general and our software-as-a-service delivery model.”
It was slow going at first. Like many entrepreneurs, Rory, Scott and Jared believed that if they built an innovative solution, customers would come running. It didn’t happen. The trio quickly realized that before organizations would be willing to purchase the service, they first had to understand the concept. So the three set about showing potential customers how Avalara’s services could help them automate previously manual processes and dramatically reduce the time they spent managing sales tax processes—while reassuring them their critical data were completely safe with Avalara.
Slowly but inevitably, the concept began to catch on, and today Avalara is recognized as the pioneer in the field of automating and outsourcing the calculation and compliance of transactional taxes. More than 10,000 businesses of all sizes worldwide rely on our proven services, making us the trusted provider of 100 million sales tax calculations and $10 billion in filings annually.
And there’s plenty of room to grow. The concept of outsourcing sales tax is one that remains foreign to many businesses. But like payroll, we strongly believe this is a trend that will not be denied. Sales tax automation is inevitable, and Avalara remains the acknowledged leader in providing this service.
Today, at Avalara, we pride ourselves not only on the award-winning technology we provide our customers, but also on the talent and dedication of our people. Each day, we strive to live the principle on which our company was founded:“Most people wait for the future to come to them, but if you are an innovator you make the future: You dream it, you plan it and you make it happen.”