Technology Record - Issue 22: Autumn 2021

73 Avalara’s Compliance Cloud platform helps its customers achieve compliance with transac- tional taxes imposed by authorities worldwide, processing billions of transactions and filing hundreds of thousands of documents each year. By operating on the cloud, this expertise is available to businesses whenever and wherever they want, an advantage which has only become clearer during the Covid-19 pandemic. “At Avalara, we’ve been a cloud-first company from day one,” says Parthasarathy. “In order to pay taxes, you need to have lots of documents relevant to the filing, with invoices being just one example. And one of the things that the pandemic has taught us is that if the documents required for compliance are in the office, they can very suddenly become unavailable. The cloud therefore becomes a very natural part of not just the calculating and returns, but every part of the compliance workflow. The best thing you can do with any important tax document is to digitise it, put it in the cloud and make it accessible to all the systems that run your business.” The Avalara platform also benefits from over 1,000 signed partner integrations across accounting, enterprise resource planning, e-commerce, shopping cart and business appli- cations. This means that Avalara’s solutions can seamlessly work with business applications that companies are already familiar with, including Microsoft Dynamics 365. “We have worked with partners like Microsoft by creating integrations that are pre-built,” says Chapman. “Therefore, when we onboard cus- tomers and they’re using Microsoft Dynamics 365, we’ve got integrations that allow them to plug those in, because our calculation is done within the confines of that application.” According to Parthasarathy, these integrations are crucial to delivering a smooth customer experience on the platform. “The service has to be seamless, fast and accu- rate,” he says. “The key is to bring together the capabilities of the Microsoft Dynamics 365 plat- form and the Avalara platform through what we call connectors. Connectors take data from one side, transform it, pass it to the other side and then do it all again when the data comes back. This is crucial, for example, when a business is selling to a customer on a different continent, when the connector will take the tax calculation data, do a back calculation, and then pass it back to Dynamics 365 Finance. “That’s why we have spent a lot of time and effort partnering with Microsoft. The customer doesn’t need to see all those calculations that are happening behind the scenes. To them, it just feels like magic.” “ To them, it just feels like magic” S AN J AY PAR THA S ARATHY, AVA L ARA