Avalara simplifies the complex with Certinia on Salesforce

Overwhelmed by project complexity

Avalara is a team of tax experts and technologists that helps 30,000 customers across 95 countries achieve compliance with transactional taxes through comprehensive, automated, cloud-based solutions.

As Avalara grew quickly through organic growth and acquisitions, its professional services teams called upon a variety of disconnected systems and tools to manage 15 services and product lines. Even with integrations, the teams found it challenging to access aggregated data. Trying to manage projects and tasks in spreadsheets was impractical. Every month, professional services relied on a dedicated team to aggregate data and provide insight into business performance. To support its continued growth, Avalara knew it needed to standardize on a system that integrated with its Salesforce environment, where all orders originate and all projects must ultimately be captured.

By implementing Certinia Professional Services Cloud and leveraging both Professional Services Automation (PSA) and Revenue Management, Avalara gained the tools it needed to manage its complex professional services business.

As soon as a sales rep places an order in the system, Certinia PS Cloud automatically creates the project and assignments. Instead of four or five days passing between a deal closing and the project beginning, Avalara maintains a steady stream of projects because they now start nearly instantaneously.

Now Avalara can easily leverage skill-based routing to match tasks with the available and appropriate professional services team and track task status. Certinia PS Cloud also empowers Avalara to identify project bottlenecks and other trends.

With clear, real-time visibility into project workloads, status and priority, team members are more productive, ultimately driving higher revenue. In fact, revenue is calculated and tracked in real-time automatically, providing Avalara's managers with early insight into potential problems so it can adjust accordingly.