Jasper, a leading AI-powered marketing platform, was experiencing rapid growth and expanding its global customer base. When Amy Sunderman joined to run the finance team, she found that the company was unable to keep up with its sales tax obligations and needed an effective solution. She initially turned to Avalara, the perceived market leader, but after months of implementation headaches, she still didn’t have a functioning system for managing tax risk. Needing to find a reliable solution quickly, Jasper turned to Anrok for its SaaS-focused approach, ease of implementation, and superior customer support.
Amy Sunderman, who runs the finance team at Jasper, explains: "I need somebody who has expertise and can give me advice, not just try and make more money off of me. That’s what I got when I talked to Anrok.”
Rapid growth outpaced Avalara’s capabilities, straining Jasper’s resources
When Amy joined Jasper in 2022, the company had already grown its revenue into the tens of millions without a dedicated financial risk management solution. With a mix of self-serve and enterprise customers globally, and remote employees spread across 35 states, Jasper faced significant sales tax complexity.
With a small team focused on growth, and numerous state and global tax requirements to contend with, they needed a solution. They initially tried Stripe’s native tax solution, but found it insufficient for their needs. Looking for an enterprise-grade solution they considered both Avalara and Anrok. Ultimately, Avalara’s name recognition won out over Anrok. Then the implementation challenges started. Timelines expanded from weeks to months, and the precious internal development resources Amy had managed to pull together were working overtime.
"We were trying to work with Avalara to get them to fix the problems so that we could actually use them to remit the taxes, but they were never able to solve it… In the year that I used Avalara, they did not remit a single thing for me."
As the issues continued with Avalara, Jasper was spending thousands a month on an external accounting team to manually calculate and remit taxes, the very job they had hired Avalara to do.
