Scaling Beyond $1M: People + Platforms Power Sales Tax Success

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The $1M Sales Tax Wake-Up Call

Crossing $1 million in revenue doesn’t just change your balance sheet; it changes your visibility. New states start watching. New obligations appear. New risks take shape. In other words, you’ve just merged onto the highway of multistate compliance. Your business has momentum, your customers believe in you, and growth is no longer hypothetical. It’s happening. But here’s the catch: once you hit this faster road, sales tax stops being background noise. It becomes a risk multiplier.

Each new customer, product, and platform expands your footprint, and every state adds its own rules, rates, and reporting requirements. What once felt simple can quickly feel like navigating a maze of thresholds, tolls, and detours that keep changing.

That’s what DiAndria (Dee) Green calls The SALTy Road. The long, winding journey of state and local tax (SALT) compliance. The faster you grow, the more intentional you have to be about how you navigate it.

The Goal: Sustainable Growth Through Scalable Compliance

This isn’t about filing more tax returns. It’s about creating a sales tax strategy that scales with your growth; not one that stalls it. Sales tax is like road infrastructure. If you ignore it, you’ll hit potholes: penalties, audits, or even full stops. But if you build the right compliance engine, it runs quietly in the background, supporting every mile of growth.

The key? People + Platforms working together. Automation may power the vehicle, but people steer it, and oversight keeps it roadworthy.

The SALTy Road Framework: 3 Roles, 1 Goal

1. The Driver (People)

Judgment steers the journey. People prevent mistakes by:

• Identifying nexus and exposure risks early. Not just where you have presence, but where risk and opportunity intersect.
• Interpreting state-by-state taxability rules that automation can’t always contextualize.
• Configuring automation correctly from the start, so systems follow the right jurisdictional logic.
• Using Voluntary Disclosure Agreements (VDAs) to strategically resolve past liabilities before they compound.

That’s why people—trusted advisors—remain critical. They’re the navigators and GPS on the SALTy Road, providing direction, context, and course corrections that automation alone can’t deliver.

2. The Engine (Platforms)

Automation powers momentum. Platforms prevent inefficiencies.

Automation is a game-changer…but it’s not autopilot. Even the best software needs human setup, configuration, and on-going management. The idea that you can “turn on” a sales tax solution and walk away is one of the biggest misconceptions in compliance.

Automated sales tax software is not “set it and forget it.”

Here’s why that approach fails:

• Systems only know what you tell them. If product tax codes are wrong, automation just applies the wrong rate faster.
• Rules change constantly. Software updates tax data, but not your evolving business model.
• Exceptions need judgment. Platforms can’t interpret complex laws like marketplace facilitator or bundled transactions.

On the SALTy Road, platforms are your engine. They provide the horsepower for speed, accuracy, and scale. But without people in the driver’s seat, even the best engine can take the wrong exit.

Automation is powerful, but people make it precise.

3. The Dashboard (Oversight)

Visibility keeps you road-ready. Oversight ties it all together by:

• Monitoring nexus thresholds, registrations, and filings as growth accelerates.
• Reviewing automation outputs for accuracy and completeness.
• Re-mapping product tax codes and exemptions as laws evolve.
• Scheduling regular “sales tax tune-ups” to confirm your strategy and systems stay roadworthy.

Oversight is the dashboard; the feedback loop connecting people and platforms. It keeps the compliance engine calibrated, adaptive, and transparent.

The Inflection Point: When Growth Outpaces Compliance

Most companies feel the friction between $1M and $5M. That moment when compliance starts competing with growth.

If you’re still filing manually, the time sink is real. If your tax setup hasn’t been reviewed in a year, your exposure risk is rising. If automation is misconfigured, you’re scaling errors instead of efficiency.

That’s your cue to reassess your compliance engine. Technology alone isn’t transformation, it’s translation. It takes what your people know (or what they don’t know) and scale it.

A Real-World Detour: From Roadblocks to Readiness

A growing software company hit $1.3M and thought automation would solve everything. They registered in 25 states “just in case.”

The result? They over-registered, overpaid tax in non-taxable states, and triggered unnecessary audits.

Once a trusted advisor stepped in:

• A taxability analysis and nexus study clarified where they truly needed to register.
  
• VDAs strategically cleaned up historical liabilities.
  
• Automation relaunched with clean data and proper configuration.

Now, compliance takes hours per month—not weeks—freeing leadership to focus on customers, not notices.

Lesson: Growth without strategy multiplies mistakes. Growth with structure multiplies success.

Best Practices for Navigating the SALTy Road

✅ Audit nexus and exposure annually.
✅ Fix the past before automating.
✅ Match your platform to your complexity.
✅ Document compliance workflows.
✅ Reassess automation at every growth milestone.

Rule of Thumb: Strategy first. Automation second. Oversight always.

The Final Stretch: Staying on the SALTy Road

As revenue climbs, so does visibility, and so does responsibility. At $1M and beyond, every sale, system, and state matters more. But when people, platforms, and oversight move together, sales tax stops being a roadblock and becomes part of your growth strategy.

Because the SALTy Road isn’t really about tax. It’s about trust.

• Trust that your process can handle what’s next.
  
• Trust that your systems and your people are aligned.
  
• And trust that you can scale without slowing down.

People keep you on course. Platforms keep you moving. Oversight keeps you safe. That’s the power of collaboration. And the future of sales tax success for growing companies.

Stay on the SALTy Road. Drive forward with clarity, compliance, and confidence.

DiAndria “Dee” Green
Bennett Thrasher LLP
Phone: (770) 396-2200

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