When Google named Bainbridge Island its honorary Washington eCity of 2014, lauding it as the most Internet savvy community in all of the Evergreen state, the island’s largest employer could take some righteous gratification.
Avalara sits just steps away from the Bainbridge ferry terminal as one of the anchor companies in the new island gateway business complex that also houses a new art museum. Still, no company is an island. The tax SaaS’er has an outlook that is anything but local. All told, it has raised more than $100 million since it began its tax simplification crusade, including $30 million in funding this year. That ought to crack open a few smiles along with the coconut’s at the employee lounge’s “Tiki Bar.”
Avalara offers an automation solution for businesses to achieve compliance with sales taxes, value added taxes and other transactional taxes, collecting the right amounts to spur ecommerce and avoid audits. The firm was ranked in the top 500 on Deloitte’s Technology Fast 500™ recognizing Avalara’s fiscal year revenue growth of over 400 percent from 2008 to 2012.
Founder and CEO Scott McFarlane attributes the company’s growth to its strong increase in new customers and high renewal in existing customers. “Sales tax is critical to every sales transaction, whether or not it’s charged,” said McFarlane. “Most people think sales tax automation was solved long ago, but that’s not so. The Internet gave Avalara the opportunity to provide a practical solution to a pressing problem for businesses in the US and abroad.
“The increasing complexity of sales and use tax regulation has only amplified the need for our easy, affordable offering,” he continued. “At our core, we believe it’s simply crazy to manage sales tax manually in today’s electronic world, and we’re convinced all sales tax will be automated in the coming years.”
The new service is called TrustFile, a new sales tax reporting and filing solution for online sellers. Whether starting up or managing the complexity of a growing ecommerce business, TrustFile helps ecommerce sellers and online small businesses quickly and accurately determine their sales tax filing requirements across the many thousands of tax jurisdictions in the United States.
“A few cloud-based services exist to help small ecommerce companies with the pain of handling sales tax reporting requirements, but at a cost,” said Webb Stevens, Head of Product at Avalara. “We’re pleased to eliminate this obstacle by providing our TrustFile solution free of charge. It’s our way of helping budding ecommerce businesses get a foothold in a risk-free way.”
TrustFile provides detailed sales tax reporting information across more than 12,000 tax jurisdictions in the United States, helping online sellers know exactly where, when and how much to file. Ecommerce business owners can use TrustFile to determine whether or not they are collecting the right amount of sales tax in each individual state, and then store a record of their sales tax history securely in the cloud.
TrustFile supports Fullfilment by Amazon sellers with timely, accurate information on sales tax collection requirements based on Amazon’s business presence in states or municipalities where a seller’s customer may reside. With support for PayPal, TrustFile adds another layer of integration to make managing sales tax simple.
Additionally, TrustFile is the only complimentary solution available today allowing uploads and reconciling of any sales transaction history using .csv files. That means no matter what systems ecommerce sellers use to run their business, TrustFile provides a single solution for managing sales tax online.
“Establishing and running an ecommerce business is hard enough without the worry of when and how to file your sales tax,” said Stevens. “Avalara TrustFile eliminates the worry by making the entire process straightforward.”
To try out TrustFile, visit http://trustfile.com [24×7]
