Hightouch is a leading Composable CDP that enables companies to sync data from their data warehouse to business tools. They enable their customers to deliver personalized customer experiences, optimize performance marketing, and move faster by leveraging data across their organization. And with a distributed team of over 200 employees across 30 states, Hightouch needed a reliable solution to manage their increasingly complex sales tax obligations. When Jessi Lu joined as Controller, she quickly recognized that Hightouch's rapid growth and distributed team could lead to major compliance challenges. Without a proper sales tax automation solution in place, the company was assuming unnecessary financial risk and creating future accounting headaches. Fortunately, Jessi’s experiences at previous roles with legacy solutions and manual sales tax compliance led her to partner with Anrok. Growing complexity with distributed employees and no tax automation When Jessi joined Hightouch, the company lacked a reliable and accurate sales tax compliance process. Their process wasn’t set to accurately pass along sales tax to the customer or track nexus in different states—meaning their liability would only keep growing. Starting with their QuickBooks implementation and later NetSuite migration, Jessi struggled to find a way to properly track and manage Hightouch's growing tax obligations. With employees spread across 30 states and no restrictions on where the company hired, the challenge was only getting more complex. "Our company is primarily remote. We do have offices in San Francisco and New York but about 200 employees are spread all over the country," Jessi says. "There's just a lot of volume, and it's not feasible for me to manually file returns every single month or quarter." For Jessi, one of the biggest challenges was the lack of visibility into employee locations and the tax implications of their distributed workforce. "Every time we hired someone in a new state, I didn't know about it," Lu says. "Rippling handled all of the setup for us for withholding, but it's not a flag that comes through payroll, so I would have no idea when somebody was hired in a new state. I would have to manually compare their state against a list of states I created."

The finance team at Gem was getting infrastructure in place to support their future growth. Gem’s controller Temi Vasco knew that meant getting sales tax compliant to protect the company’s revenue—but she wasn’t sure where to start.

Learn how VP of Finance Dave Jaras and the AgentSync team get peace of mind with Anrok.