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.

Another benefit was how simple the system is to use, there was no need for huge amounts of training for their teams — once integrated AvaTax simply works!

Harry Bembridge, Head of Tax at Tenth Revolution Group said “When we were looking for the best solution we knew we wanted to work with an expert partner that we could trust and who had the right integrations to make things work seamlessly with our systems. Avalara ticked all the boxes. Choosing Avalara’s cloud-based AvaTax has freed up time that can be spent on more rewarding work for the members of the tax department.”

“The rates per jurisdiction are reliable and always up to date. Data is marshalled in a very logical and easy to understand fashion, and our team were able to use the system straight away without complex training or time to get up to speed. We’ve been able to move people onto more interesting roles and tasks that add value to our business, and not spend time on mundane data processing tasks. We’ve been delighted with our decision and have been working with Avalara for more than four years now.”

More recently, Harry and his team needed to make some changes to their Sage system. In order to make sure that they were able to test these changes they got in touch with their Avalara sales team to get access to a sandbox environment that could link to their Sage test environment. Again the process was simple and means that the team at Tenth Revolution Group can be confident that their tax calculations are always accurate, developing and testing improvements while avoiding risks to their production environment.