Accounting
Black Friday stress-tests sales tax solutions\
David Paul Morris/Bloomberg
While shoppers that took Black Friday seriously now have an opportunity to rest from their efforts before venturing back out to the malls, tax professionals who are responsible for businesses’ sales taxes may find it hard to keep up with the demands of the holiday season.
“The complexity during Black Friday, Small Business Saturday, and Cyber Monday into the holiday season is due to the serious uptick in transactions that happen during the holiday time,” said Charles Maniace, vice president of regulatory analysis & design at indirect tax software solution provider Sovos. “The way I always view it is that it’s kind of a crucible in which a retailer’s tax systems and processes are put to their maximum test if there is a weakness. If there’s a weakness or vulnerability, it’s going to be revealed and become a problem during the holiday.”
“For example, let’s say your organization doesn’t apply a solution that’s particularly on top of rate and rule and requirement changes,” he continued. “It’s during this time where you’ll be processing for some companies that process the majority of their sales during the holiday. So if you’re going to get taxed wrong because you don’t know that a rate or a rule has changed in a given jurisdiction, the effect of not having the right answer will more robustly be manifest when you’re making your most sales. Of course, this creates potentially a customer service problem: The last thing you need during the holiday season is people flooding your customer support line with questions about why you’re applying incorrect sales tax. It’s a customer service disaster. And it creates the greatest audit exposure because that’s where the highest volume is.”
“People are buying a large volume of goods at this time, and if a retailer is applying the wrong tax rate, it’s a recipe for a future audit liability that’s going to sit on your books for a couple of years until the auditors come knocking and then it will reveal itself in a very painful way,” said Maniace. “The other issue is scalability and whether your solution can handle the increased volume. If you have an automated solution, is that solution capable of supporting you in your most challenging time? Can it handle the increased volume without doing something incorrect or inaccurate?”
There is also a potential issue with the interplay with economic nexus, according to Maniace.
“There’s still a whole bunch of states, including California, that say your obligation to collect and remit sales tax occurs during the next transaction after you cross an economic nexus threshold,” he explained. “For smaller sellers, it means that if they experience a holiday spike, if they cross the threshold during the holiday, then they become obligated to collect and remit sales and use tax on the next sale. So let’s say a state has a $100,000-in-gross-sales threshold, and they cross that threshold after Black Friday but before Cyber Monday. Technically they have an obligation to collect and remit a tax on Cyber Monday.”
The only way a company can turn around on a dime and go from being not compliant to being compliant is by having a solution in place that allows you to effectively turn on your compliance with the flip of a switch or a phone call, Maniace observed.
“You have to be able to work with your provider on an immediate basis, flip a couple of switches in your solution, and start collecting and remitting on a timely manner,” he said. “This is where technology providers prove their mettle — are they truly up all of the time, and will that uptime persist when all of their clients are pinging the system for transactions that are happening in real time.”
Retail delivery fees: The next big trend?
Colorado introduced a retail delivery fee several years ago, and Minnesota followed with their own version in July 2024. Maniace foresees other states developing their such a fee in coming years, with each one differing from the other.
“It’s a 50 cent fee applied to orders over $100 that include either a taxable item or non-taxable clothing,” he explained. “There’s a mechanism in Minnesota law that allows a seller to either pass this on to their customer directly as a charge on their invoice or absorb the cost. A seller may choose to absorb that cost and that may work for them for a period of a few months, but when they do that it comes out of their bottom line. Unless they’re overtly raising their costs to account for something like the retail delivery fee, it’s coming out of their profits. It’s a relatively recent law change and if you haven’t adopted it or accounted for it on an automated basis, it’s going to really cut into your profits come this Christmas.”
“A number of other states have expressed interest in it,” he noted. “Washington commissioned a study on it, and Nebraska considered it in their last special session, but ultimately chose not to adopt it. I suspect that this coming legislative session, and future ones, we could see a number of other states adopting something like the retail delivery fee. When you pyramid one on top of another, with each one working differently, you’re adding a great deal of complexity.”
Big Four firm PwC announced new agentic AI capacities, including a model that proactively identifies areas of value leakage and acts inside the tools teams already use to fix them itself.
The new solution,
The software, which is supported by PwC’s recently released
The system connects directly into ERP environments, continuously monitors key metrics, and acts inside the tools teams already use. For example, a supply chain agent might detect rising shipping costs and automatically reroute deliveries to reduce spend. Finance agents can spot and correct billing errors before they reach the customer. Clients typically see measurable efficiency gains in the first quarter, with continued improvements over time as the system learns and adapts.
“Too many transformations still rely on one-off pilots and stale data, stretching the gap from insight to impact and suffocating ROI,” said Saurabh Sarbaliya, PwC’s principal for enterprise strategy and value. “Agent Powered Performance flips the economics by distilling PwC’s industry transformation playbooks into AI agents that turn static insights into compounding gains, without rebooting each time.”
Agent Powered Performance is platform-agnostic and built on an open architecture so it can work across different LLMs based on client preferences and task-specific needs. It works with major enterprise platforms including Oracle, SAP, Workday and Guidewire.
Agent OS Model Context Protocol
PwC also
By integrating this standard, agent systems registered as MCP servers can be used by any authorized AI agent. This reduces redundant integration work and the overhead of writing custom logic for each new use case. By standardizing how agents invoke tools and handle responses, MCP also simplifies the interface between agents and enterprise systems, which will serve to reduce development time, lower testing complexity, and cut deployment risk. Finally, any interaction between an agent and an MCP server is authenticated, authorized and logged, and access policies are enforced at the protocol level, which means that compliance and control are native to the system—not layered on after the fact.
This means that agents are no longer siloed. Instead, they can operate as part of a coordinated, governed system that can grow as needs evolve, as MCP support provides the interface to external tools and systems. This enables organizations to move beyond isolated pilots toward integrated systems where agents don’t just reason, but act inside real business workflows. It marks a shift from experimentation to adoption, from isolated tools to scalable, governed intelligence.
Research Composer
Finally, a PwC spokesperson said the firm has also launched a new internal tool for its professionals called Research Composer, a patent-pending AI research agent embedded in the firm’s ChatPwC suite, designed to accelerate insight generation by combining web data with PwC-uploaded content.
Professionals will use the Research Composer to produce in-depth, citation-backed reports for either the firm or its clients. The solution is intended to enhance the quality of client work by equipping teams with research and strategic analysis capabilities.
The AI agent prompts users through a step-by-step research workflow, allowing them to shape how reports are packaged—tailoring the output to meet strategic needs. For example, a manager in advisory services might use Research Composer to evaluate white space opportunities across industries or geographies, drawing from internal reports and up-to-date market data.
Eide Bailly, a Top 25 Firm based in Fargo, North Dakota, is growing its presence in the Pacific Northwest by adding Traner Smith, based in Edmonds, Washington, effective June 2, 2025.
Traner Smith’s team includes two partners and 16 staff members and specializes in tax compliance and advisory services. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. Eide Bailly ranked No. 19 on
Eide Bailly already has offices in Seattle, but hopes to grow further in the Pacific Northwest. “We’re pleased to welcome the talented team at Traner Smith to Eide Bailly,” said Eide Bailly managing partner and CEO Jeremy Hauk in a statement Monday. “Their expertise with high-net-worth individuals, real estate and privately held businesses aligns well with our strengths, and their client-centric approach is a perfect cultural fit. Having an office in Edmonds, Washington, is a great complement to our existing presence in Seattle. Together, we’re poised to deliver even greater value to families and businesses in the Seattle metro area.”
“Joining Eide Bailly is a natural next step for us — it provides access to deeper technical resources in areas like state and local tax, national tax, succession planning and international tax while allowing us to continue the personalized service our clients value,” said Kevin Smith, a partner at Traner Smith, in a statement.
“With this expanded support and platform, we’re excited to grow our reach, elevate what we do best, and help more clients than ever before,” said Shane Summer, another partner at Traner Smith, in a statement.
Eide Bailly has announced several other mergers in recent weeks. Earlier this month, it added
In 2023, Eide Bailly added
Top 100 firm
“We began working with Knuula in Spring 2024 to streamline our engagement letter process,” said Don Murphy, Managing Member of BMSS. “It quickly became clear that Knuula was not only a strong solution for us, but also an ideal partner in advancing industry-wide automation.”
While the specific terms of the deal were not disclosed, a spokesperson with Knuula said that, after this investment, BMSS and a collection of 21 of their partners now own 13% of the company. The investment represents not some passive revenue deal but an active collaboration between the two companies, with the spokesperson saying they will be working closely together on things like product development, new features, improvements, and networking.
The deal comes about a year after Knuula integrated with QuickFee, a receivables management platform for professional service providers, which allowed users to have engagement letters directly connecting to their QuickFee billing platform, tying the execution of the letter directly to the billing process.
“We’ve long sought to partner with a firm focused on strategic innovation in the accounting space,” said Jamie Peebles, founder of Knuula. “To develop a perfect solution for large firms, it is ideal to have a partner that is willing to work closely together and iterate quickly. This requires constant feedback between our two teams. The IT team from BMSS worked with our development team constantly and helped us iterate rapidly. We also had consistent input from partners, manager, and administrative staff to help us make valuable changes to Knuula. BMSS was a perfect partner for us.”
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