ShipHawk is revolutionizing the logistics industry by offering advanced shipping and warehouse management software designed to automate and streamline the fulfillment process. With fast revenue growth and remote employee hiring, the ShipHawk finance team faced significant challenges in navigating the complex landscape of multi-state sales tax compliance.
With Anrok, they were able to streamline their sales tax processes, achieving substantial cost savings and reducing their potential liability.
Navigating multi-state sales tax complexity
As ShipHawk expanded its remote workforce across more than 20 states, the company encountered increasing complexities in sales tax compliance. Meena Izadpanah, ShipHawk's Controller, recognized the urgent need to address these challenges, particularly in light of future investor relations and potential acquisition scenarios.
“As the company started to grow, and then of course with COVID, we really expanded into hiring in other states. So when I first joined, I started to talk to my team about sales tax,” Izadpanah says. “I explained that the burden was on us, and that any exposure would follow us. That one day we’d be in a board meeting or pitching someone to give us millions of dollars and they're going to ask about this and say ‘what's your liability?’”
What pushed the conversations over the line was when, in 2022, the company did their first annual audit. Izadpanah “knew that we would have to have a liability on the balance sheet, and that's what drove this conversation.”When they kicked off the project, Izadpanah says, “we had 23 states where we had potential sales tax liabilities to work through. I was thinking “I can't believe this is happening to me. How am I going to figure this out? I have so many states to do this in.”