AvaTax takes Unity's US sales tax compliance to the next level

If you’re a game player then it is more than likely that you’ve played a game built on the Unity platform, as it is one of the most successful and flexible development environments on the market, and underpins the operations of half the world’s video games.

Since its launch in Demark in 2004 as a development platform targeted at the Mac operating system, Unity Technologies has enjoyed strong growth. Today it operates across nearly 30 different platforms and enjoys global sales employing over 1,500 staff. Such rapid growth requires the freeing of back office systems that can scale just as rapidly as the business.

“Selling into so many different markets opens up a whole world of complexity when it comes to tax calculation,” Patrick Loughnane, Unity Technologies’ Senior Product Manager, explains. “We sell into over 60 different territories where they use Sales Tax, VAT or IVA. In all countries we face a deep layer of added complexity, from defining a Nexus or ‘place of sale’, and complying with the turnover thresholds, so that the correct level of tax can be applied and returned to the relevant taxation authorities.”

“I asked my peers to give me an honest appraisal. The overwhelming response was ‘it’s great’. Overall, they said there was just no way they could cope without AvaTax.”

Having a system that can cope with all geographies and tax permutations, means the company is able to match the expansion of its business operations with tax compliance very easily, as Patrick explains. “One of the most interesting features about AvaTax to me is that you can turn on a Tax Nexus then run User Acceptance Testing for all our 60 products and the tax engine tells us the tax rates for each product in each geography instantly.”

“Before we used AvaTax, setting up a new geography was a huge ordeal. Now it takes less than an hour.” He continues.

Patrick is also impressed by the reliability of the platform. “We use AvaTax for Sales Tax in the US and VAT in Finland, Denmark, China, Singapore, Korea and Japan as well as all other territories where some form of sales tax is applied. It pretty much offers a plug’n’play functionality, which means we can scale instantly and know that the data it uses will be wholly accurate. Not having to build complex tax codes, but having it all streamlined through Avalara has made a massive difference to our workload.”

“Avalara is a truly amazing company, not only does it provide an outstanding suite of tax management applications that work seamlessly, it is backed up by very high levels of service quality and the assurance that it will do its job globally.”

“It’s not very often that you find an accounting solution having a major impact on the sales relationship, but the fact that AvaTax is able to ensure we always get it right speaks to the whole question of customer trust,” he continues. “After all, if we can’t send them an accurate bill, what would that say about the attention to detail in our products?”

“I’m really happy we have this platform, because it means our folks don’t need to be on top of the thousands of tax changes that happen around the world each month – AvaTax does it for us,” he continues. “From our perspective one of its greatest strengths is its simplicity in use – the interface is deeply intuitive, all the calculations are done swiftly and it has a massive USP in the quality of the underpinning data.”