Avalara’s new president, Ross Tennenbaum, wants to center the indirect tax solutions provider squarely on its customers.
In his new, expanded role , which was announced Tuesday, Tennenbaum will be responsible for driving company-wide improvements and ensuring the success of every Avalara customer around the globe. As president, he will oversee the majority of the company’s business operations, including Avalara AvaTax for sales and use tax calculations, Avalara Returns, Avalara Exemption Certificate Management, and Avalara Tax Research. Tennenbaum will also lead the teams responsible for Avalara’s customer and compliance operations, finance functions, India operations, and legal functions. He replaces the previous president, Amit Mathradas, who departed more than a year ago.
Ross Tennenbaum
Kenneth A Appelbaum/Avalara, Inc.
While Tennenbaum had previously been CFO at Avalara, his involvement with the company goes back further than that, having become familiar with Avalara when, as an investment banker, he personally worked with the business to launch its IPO in 2018. After that he was brought into Avalara as executive vice president of strategic initiatives, where he oversaw building integrations between the businesses it had acquired, and eventually replaced the CFO when he retired.
His experience, he said in an interview with Accounting Today, means he knows the company inside and out, adding that he likes getting into the weeds to understand even the small details.
Tennenbaum said his immediate priority is in examining the company’s core products, “the heritage of the company,” from top to bottom in order to see where any steps along the customer process from marketing and sales to onboarding and support can be made more efficient and user-friendly, stating, “I think we can drive more growth in the business, I think we can do better by our partners and our customers and run a more profitable machine, so that is step one.”
In the longer term, he expressed a desire to center the customer experience for a more streamlined and simple application that gets as close to self-service as possible.
“We’re giving customers a better experience, the ability to self-serve … We want to make sure that customers have one front door to come into. We’re providing the best experience based on the problem. We understand the time and effort it takes to solve different kinds of problems and we have the right agents aligned to it, or AI, where we can. We’re owning those cases all the way to the end with the right solutions, so overall a better experience, more proactive support, leveraging more AI and a smarter experience,” he said.
Part of this vision is the new AI-driven support portal which is set to launch later this year, which provides a centralized space where people can get assistance with their solutions. The chatbot, he said, can field questions on the fly like how people can change their passwords. While it is initially meant to handle simple inquiries, there are already plans to bolster the AI’s capacities to handle very complex questions and give more intelligent answers,
Beyond this, Tennenbaum also pointed out Avalara’s wider ambitions to expand further into compliance solutions. He noted that while customers like their sales tax solutions, they have so many more compliance obligations to worry about, and the bigger the company the more they have as they cross multiple jurisdictions, “and heaven forbid you’re global and you’ve got obligations all over the world.” Taxes tend to lead into compliance anyway (think of the need to register with a jurisdiction once nexus is established), so it seems a natural fit for them to expand this way.
“We want to expand to help our customers with all their compliance obligations. It starts with tax, but some of these aren’t even necessarily tax-related … GDPR obligations, or HIPAA type obligations, trucks crossing state lines and having to file certain forms,” he said, though he added that, “The here and now is sales tax, [but] why can’t we be growing new product lines?”
With this in mind, he pointed to the company’s efforts to expand into e-invoicing as well, which is increasingly becoming mandated in markets like the European Union. Avalara itself recently took part in the first successful test of a U.S. e-invoicing network sponsored by the Federal Reserve. Tennenbaum said this is likely the way the entire world will soon be going, and he does not want to be caught unprepared.
“We bought some things and built some things and it’s going well,” he said. While he demurred on the specifics, Tennenbaum said, “We have some really great partnerships in the works with some blue chip partners and some really great early customers on the e-invoicing side.”
But the core tax focus has not been forgotten either. He said that Avalara has built out its capacities on the use tax side of things, noting that it’s the other side of the coin of sales tax.
Avalara’s initial public offering on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange on June 15, 2018.
Michael Nagle/Bloomberg
“Every time I buy something, someone is selling something, so for every transaction there are two sides, buyer and seller,” he said, adding that focusing on the use tax side of things can make Avalara an even bigger part of transactions. “Everyone has use tax obligations. We’re saying, ‘Hey, we can help with the process for both sales and use tax.’ There’s many situations where customers are buying things where they should be exempt or the seller is charging the wrong rate of tax, either overpaying or underpaying, and that could be millions from your pocket.”
Artificial intelligence will be key to Avalara’s plans going forward. He said the company has made great strides in terms of applying AI to document classification and optical character recognition, but felt there was much more they could do. For instance, while AI currently can facilitate many processes, it relies on a relatively static set of knowledge content — what if, in the future, AI could update this content automatically as rules and regulations change? E-invoicing compliance, for example, involves dealing with multiple jurisdictions with different mandates and different timeframes and different requirements based on where one does business, some of which could change in the future and require different solutions. AI could recognize these changes and adjust itself accordingly, and perhaps even recommend new solutions that can help users in specific situations.
Tennenbaum’s vision for AI is part of his larger ambition to center the customer and make the experience as seamless as possible.
“I think our customer experience is siloed. I want to take on the mantle of a great customer experience and make it great for our customers and partners and when you apply that to AI, it helps us me more efficient because there is less throwing people at the work … . It is a win-win-win: partners are happier, customers are happier, and we get much more efficiency,” he said.
The International Auditing and Assurance Standards Board is proposing to tailor some of its standards to align with recent additions to the International Ethics Standards Board for Accountants’ International Code of Ethics for Professional Accountants when it comes to using the work of an external expert.
The IAASB is asking for comments via a digital response template that can be found on the IAASB website by July 24, 2025.
In December 2023, the IESBA approved an exposure draft for proposed revisions to the IESBA’s Code of Ethics related to using the work of an external expert. The proposals included three new sections to the Code of Ethics, including provisions for professional accountants in public practice; professional accountants in business and sustainability assurance practitioners. The IESBA approved the provisions on using the work of an external expert at its December 2024 meeting, establishing an ethical framework to guide accountants and sustainability assurance practitioners in evaluating whether an external expert has the necessary competence, capabilities and objectivity to use their work, as well as provisions on applying the Ethics Code’s conceptual framework when using the work of an outside expert.
President Donald Trump’s tariffs would effectively cause a tax increase for low-income families that is more than three times higher than what wealthier Americans would pay, according to an analysis from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy.
The report from the progressive think tank outlined the outcomes for Americans of all backgrounds if the tariffs currently in effect remain in place next year. Those making $28,600 or less would have to spend 6.2% more of their income due to higher prices, while the richest Americans with income of at least $914,900 are expected to spend 1.7% more. Middle-income families making between $55,100 and $94,100 would pay 5% more of their earnings.
Trump has imposed the steepest U.S. duties in more than a century, including a 145% tariff on many products from China, a 25% rate on most imports from Canada and Mexico, duties on some sectors such as steel and aluminum and a baseline 10% tariff on the rest of the country’s trading partners. He suspended higher, customized tariffs on most countries for 90 days.
Economists have warned that costs from tariff increases would ultimately be passed on to U.S. consumers. And while prices will rise for everyone, lower-income families are expected to lose a larger portion of their budgets because they tend to spend more of their earnings on goods, including food and other necessities, compared to wealthier individuals.
Food prices could rise by 2.6% in the short run due to tariffs, according to an estimate from the Yale Budget Lab. Among all goods impacted, consumers are expected to face the steepest price hikes for clothing at 64%, the report showed.
The Yale Budget Lab projected that the tariffs would result in a loss of $4,700 a year on average for American households.
Artificial intelligence is just getting started in the accounting world, but it is already helping firms like technology specialist Schellman do more things with fewer people, allowing the firm to scale back hiring and reduce headcount in certain areas through natural attrition.
Schellman CEO Avani Desai said there have definitely been some shifts in headcount at the Top 100 Firm, though she stressed it was nothing dramatic, as it mostly reflects natural attrition combined with being more selective with hiring. She said the firm has already made an internal decision to not reduce headcount in force, as that just indicates they didn’t hire properly the first time.
“It hasn’t been about reducing roles but evolving how we do work, so there wasn’t one specific date where we ‘started’ the reduction. It’s been more case by case. We’ve held back on refilling certain roles when we saw opportunities to streamline, especially with the use of new technologies like AI,” she said.
One area where the firm has found such opportunities has been in the testing of certain cybersecurity controls, particularly within the SOC framework. The firm examined all the controls it tests on the service side and asked which ones require human judgment or deep expertise. The answer was a lot of them. But for the ones that don’t, AI algorithms have been able to significantly lighten the load.
“[If] we don’t refill a role, it’s because the need actually has changed, or the process has improved so significantly [that] the workload is lighter or shared across the smarter system. So that’s what’s happening,” said Desai.
Outside of client services like SOC control testing and reporting, the firm has found efficiencies in administrative functions as well as certain internal operational processes. On the latter point, Desai noted that Schellman’s engineers, including the chief information officer, have been using AI to help develop code, which means they’re not relying as much on outside expertise on the internal service delivery side of things. There are still people in the development process, but their roles are changing: They’re writing less code, and doing more reviewing of code before it gets pushed into production, saving time and creating efficiencies.
“The best way for me to say this is, to us, this has been intentional. We paused hiring in a few areas where we saw overlaps, where technology was really working,” said Desai.
However, even in an age awash with AI, Schellman acknowledges there are certain jobs that need a human, at least for now. For example, the firm does assessments for the FedRAMP program, which is needed for cloud service providers to contract with certain government agencies. These assessments, even in the most stable of times, can be long and complex engagements, to say nothing of the less predictable nature of the current government. As such, it does not make as much sense to reduce human staff in this area.
“The way it is right now for us to do FedRAMP engagements, it’s a very manual process. There’s a lot of back and forth between us and a third party, the government, and we don’t see a lot of overall application or technology help… We’re in the federal space and you can imagine, [with] what’s going on right now, there’s a big changing market condition for clients and their pricing pressure,” said Desai.
As Schellman reduces staff levels in some places, it is increasing them in others. Desai said the firm is actively hiring in certain areas. In particular, it’s adding staff in technical cybersecurity (e.g., penetration testers), the aforementioned FedRAMP engagements, AI assessment (in line with recently becoming an ISO 42001 certification body) and in some client-facing roles like marketing and sales.
“So, to me, this isn’t about doing more with less … It’s about doing more of the right things with the right people,” said Desai.
While these moves have resulted in savings, she said that was never really the point, so whatever the firm has saved from staffing efficiencies it has reinvested in its tech stack to build its service line further. When asked for an example, she said the firm would like to focus more on penetration testing by building a SaaS tool for it. While Schellman has a proof of concept developed, she noted it would take a lot of money and time to deploy a full solution — both of which the firm now has more of because of its efficiency moves.
“What is the ‘why’ behind these decisions? The ‘why’ for us isn’t what I think you traditionally see, which is ‘We need to get profitability high. We need to have less people do more things.’ That’s not what it is like,” said Desai. “I want to be able to focus on quality. And the only way I think I can focus on quality is if my people are not focusing on things that don’t matter … I feel like I’m in a much better place because the smart people that I’ve hired are working on the riskiest and most complicated things.”