Orbus Software chose Avalara to automate its US sales tax for international growth

Orbus Software is an independent provider of software and services for digital transformation. Founded in 2004 and headquartered in the UK, Orbus’s customers are predominantly large, blue-chip organisations located across the Americas, EMEA, Australasia and the ASEAN, spanning all industry sectors.

By 2016, Orbus’s customer base was growing at an average of 25% annually and the US had been identified as a key market for future growth. The finance team realised that their manual processes for calculating US sales tax were going to be too labour intensive and time consuming to handle their rapid growth.

They knew that managing the complexities of US sales tax meant Orbus needed a compliance partner with the tools and expertise to automate sales tax calculations and reduce the risk of expensive errors.

So they started to look for an automated solution with comprehensive coverage. Orbus wanted to ensure that the partner it chose would enable them to keep on top of the main sales tax rates in different states, as well as the numerous local rates in the many thousands of taxing authorities and jurisdictions.

Orbus uses the Quickbooks Online accounting system and the team recognised that their compliance solution needed to integrate with this. Avalara’s prebuilt integration for Quickbooks meant that AvaTax was simple to implement and the professional services team at Avalara were on hand to ensure that everything went smoothly. After implementation, any questions the Orbus team had were easily answered using Avalara's Support and the Online learning centre.

In 2016, when they first partnered with Avalara, the Orbus team only needed to manage sales tax in New York. But as the business grew AvaTax really came into its own. Now the business is selling to 26 different states across the US, which requires compliance with multiple economic nexus rules and potentially thousands of different rates and reporting requirements.

This type of growth would have been almost impossible for the Orbus team to manage if they had been relying on the previous manual systems for tax compliance.

Dirk Grobelaar Finance Manager at Orbus said: “Partnering with Avalara has been a great experience. AvaTax is so simple to use and makes it easy for us to manage our tax compliance and ensure that we can accurately calculate the correct sales tax in multiple jurisdictions.”

Today, Orbus' customers number over 500 global organisations, all investing in Orbus to enhance their competitiveness through business and IT transformation. With Avalara able to provide indirect tax compliance globally, the team at Orbus are able to seek out more growth opportunities, safe in the knowledge that they’ll be supported by their partnership with Avalara.