Brilliant Worldwide, Inc. operates a global commerce platform serving customers across all 50 US states and nearly every country worldwide. The company needed a sales tax solution built for international scale—one that wouldn't slow down growth or demand additional finance headcount.
When your legacy platform becomes a barrier to growth
As Brilliant expanded globally, the company found itself managing sales tax compliance across an increasingly complex footprint. Their existing solution, Avalara, was creating more problems than it solved, and those problems were compounding as the business grew.
“We were dealing with a buggy Stripe integration that would break without warning,” says Eli Ross, COO at Brilliant. “On top of that, Avalara's international reporting required us to manually fill out and upload reports to a separate website. For a company operating at our scale, it just wasn't sustainable.”
The operational challenges were significant. The engineering team spent several hours each month troubleshooting integration issues and data flow problems. A split system architecture (one for US, another for international) created inefficiency and increased risk. Canadian compliance was particularly painful and required manual wire transfers.
Beyond the time drain, the reliability issues created uncertainty. When integration problems arose, Brilliant couldn't be confident their sales tax data was accurate or complete.
“Our previous solution required manual uploads for international reporting and had integration issues,” Eli explains. “We needed something that could handle both US and global sales tax in one place without growing our team.”
One platform for US and international compliance
When evaluating alternatives to Avalara, Brilliant considered both Stripe Tax and Anrok. While Stripe Tax offered basic functionality for payment processing, Anrok's comprehensive approach to both US and global sales tax, combined with superior integration reliability, made it the clear winner.
“The deciding factor was that Anrok could handle US and global sales tax in one platform,” Eli says. “We didn't want to piece together multiple solutions or maintain separate workflows for different regions.”
The implementation process was efficient and well-supported. In just three weeks, Brilliant migrated their US registrations from Avalara to Anrok, configured their API integration with Stripe (with plans to transition to Anrok's native Stripe integration), set up international jurisdictions including EU VAT and Canadian GST/HST and provincial taxes, and transitioned international filings to Anrok's VAT platform. And, once live, the difference was immediate:
“The integration just works,” Eli notes. “Data flows cleanly between Stripe and Anrok—no debugging, no unexpected breaks, no engineering time wasted troubleshooting.”
Global compliance without the operational overhead
The impact of switching to Anrok was immediate and measurable. Monthly time spent on sales tax compliance dropped from more than 4 hours a month to less than one, and the engineering team was completely freed from integration troubleshooting.
“Our engineering team went from spending several hours a month troubleshooting sales tax integration issues to basically zero,” Eli explains. “The data flows between Stripe and Anrok are significantly cleaner than they ever were with Avalara.”
The benefits have continued to compound as Anrok releases new features. When Anrok launched automated tax filings in Canada, it eliminated one of Brilliant's remaining manual processes – including the need for manual wire transfers.
For companies operating internationally or planning to expand globally, Eli has clear advice: “Anrok feels like the future of sales tax software. We came from Avalara, and going back would feel like going back to the 90s.”
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