MiiR manages company growth and tax obligations seamlessly with Avalara

Bryan Papé founded MiiR in 2010 to fill a void for simple, functional, and appealing drinkware while giving back to the community. Though based in Seattle, Washington, MiiR sells its products online, through resellers and corporate partnerships across the United States. A portion of every MiiR sale is trackable to giving projects in local communities.

MiiR began selling through social media platforms in 2010 and gained a dedicated following. During this early phase, Bryan managed sales tax filings for the state of Washington manually and it caused significant frustration. “Sales and use tax is maybe one of the worst systems in the world — tracking the changes and updates without notification. It’s the biggest pain,” he says.

Tracking tax rate changes by ZIP code, updating spreadsheets manually, then uploading sales tax data to MiiR’s point-of-sale system wasn’t the best use of the CEO’s time, especially when trying to reconcile and file returns. Bryan continues, “We’d be confident we were collecting the correct amount, but the reconciliation would inevitably be off.”

The lack of confidence when submitting returns to Washington state was troubling to Bryan. “If we collected too much, then we needed to return it to the customer. If we didn’t collect enough, we had to pay out of pocket to make up the difference. The reconciliation and remittance process was an absolute nightmare.”

Realizing MiiR was on a positive growth path and that these challenges would only increase, Bryan knew he needed a better solution.

When Bryan heard about sales tax automation, he was interested. A solution that handled the complexity of sales tax and reduced the burden of managing it manually was key to MiiR’s decision to implement Avalara. 

Brett Wilder, accounting manager at MiiR, appreciates the ease of integrating AvaTax and their other systems. “AvaTax is just hands off. It plugs right into our ERP system, Acumatica. Transactions are pulled in and all I have to do is a quick check to make sure everything totals and nets up.”

AvaTax includes threshold monitoring so MiiR knows when their online sales are close to or surpass an economic threshold. Brett says, “It’s right there on the front page of AvaTax. It is so easy to monitor since each state lights up once you start to approach a nexus threshold.”