In 2015, Colby Bauer lost his wallet while surfing in Hawaii and was disappointed with the boring sea of brown and black leather options to replace it. He soon discovered he could print directly onto elastic, and today Thread Wallets — based in Provo, Utah — offers revitalized form and function to wallets and other accessories.

In 2018, the United States Supreme Court decision in South Dakota v. Wayfair, Inc. triggered new nexus obligations for Thread Wallets. “It took me three or four months to figure out what that meant for us and how we needed to respond,” says Mitch Sanders, the company’s COO. “I was a very stressed-out person.”

The company’s website is its primary channel, but it also does some wholesale business through small boutiques and large retail chains like Zumiez. And as the company grows, Amazon.com is an increasingly important channel. Keeping up with ever-changing tax rates and rules across a growing number of jurisdictions was hard enough, but having to include data from Amazon.com sales and researching marketplace facilitator laws made things worse. “It’s very tedious and difficult to pull multiple tax reports from Amazon,” says Mitch. “Then there’s the very manual process of meshing them together and reconciling them for filing. That was a huge headache.”

Mitch was already familiar with Avalara AvaTax through the company’s Shopify Plus subscription. “Sales tax is so hard to understand for someone who isn’t an expert,” says Mitch. “That’s not what I do, and that’s not where my value to our company lies.”

“AvaTax and Shopify Plus were working pretty well for us, but we needed to find a solution for the Amazon side of things,” Mitch explains. Avalara Extractor for Amazon was designed to do exactly that — it automatically syncs your Amazon.com sales with Avalara to make preparing and filing returns easier.

With Avalara Extractor for Amazon and Avalara Returns, Mitch no longer worries about the complexities and risks of managing sales tax from multiple channels in multiple jurisdictions. “Avalara has saved me tons of time and lots of headache,” he says. “I have a lot of other things I need to work on, and I don’t want to spend more time on sales tax. With Avalara, I just set it and forget it for the most part.”

Mitch estimates he’s saving 5 to ten hours per month just because Avalara keeps up with changing rates and rules for him. “At least once a week we’ll get a notification that some state or a tiny jurisdiction is changing their rates,” he says. “Nothing feels better than just shredding those letters because I know Avalara is taking care of it.”

Thread Wallets is now filing returns in 44 states and the District of Columbia. Prior to using Avalara Returns to automate those filings, the company was filing manually — and only in Utah. What if the company had to file manually in every jurisdiction where it’s currently registered? “I don’t even want to think about how much time that would take,” Mitch laughs. “I think I would spend upwards of 20 hours a month. It could easily be more, given how rudimentary some of the states’ websites are.”

Perhaps the benefit Mitch appreciates most is the hardest to quantify: the peace of mind he gets from knowing the complexities of sales tax compliance are being handled expertly and automatically. “It makes me feel so much more at ease,” he says, “knowing that sales tax isn’t something that will hold us back from growing our business.”