Software Engineering Manager

Closing the use tax gap in Coupa's procure-to-pay process. July 16, 2026 Most finance leaders can describe their sales tax process in a single sentence: "We use AvaTax, it works, we move on." Use tax on the purchase side rarely earns that same confidence. It tends to be fragmented, applied inconsistently, and handled after the fact, introducing risk and inefficiency into everyday operations. That disconnect shows up consistently across Coupa and finance transformation engagements, and it's exactly the gap Cross Connect for AvaTax was built to close. Learn what it means to embed tax into procure-to-pay, why purchase-side tax quietly becomes a liability, and how leading finance organizations are moving tax upstream in the process. The challenge: Tax isn't embedded in the process. Across organizations, a familiar pattern emerges. Tax on purchases isn't determined at the point of decision. Responsibility is spread across teams with no clear owner, and issues surface late, usually during reconciliation or audit prep, when options are limited and pressure is high. The financial impact is real: * Overpaid tax that's rarely recovered * Underaccrued tax that creates audit exposure * Operational drag across accounts payable and tax teams This isn't simply a tooling problem. It reflects a broader gap in how tax is built into procurement. When tax sits outside the process, it becomes something you reconstruct rather than something you control. This challenge isn't unique to any one organization. A recent Avalara survey found that 53% of finance, tax, and procurement leaders cite complex, ever-changing tax rules as one of their most significant challenges, and more than half said better integration with purchasing systems would meaningfully improve their compliance posture. A shift is already underway. Leading finance organizations are addressing this by moving tax upstream, from a downstream reporting activity to a transaction-level control. The change reshapes how teams operate: * Finance gains visibility into total cost before commitment. * Accounts payable sees fewer exceptions and smoother processing. * Tax teams shift from reconciliation to proactive risk management. Embedding tax earlier is no longer a "nice to have." It's becoming a requirement for maintaining control, compliance, and efficiency at scale. The organizations getting ahead treat tax as part of the decision, not a problem to clean up later. This mirrors a broader trend across procurement technology, where teams are increasingly building governance and controls directly into transaction workflows rather than layering them on afterward, a theme Cnm Llp has also explored in the context of AI-enabled accounts payable. Where Cross Connect fits. Cross Connect integrates Avalara's AvaTax directly into Coupa's procure-to-pay process. Rather than addressing tax after the fact, it embeds tax determination into the flow of transactions. Instead of reconstructing tax positions at month-end, your organization can: * See tax earlier in the purchasing process * Validate tax in real time * Maintain a consistent, audit-ready position across spend The result is a more transparent, efficient approach to managing indirect tax, without disrupting how your teams already work inside Coupa. What this means for finance teams. The day-to-day impact is meaningful and measurable: * Tax teams spend less time on reconciliation and more on planning and exposure management. * Accounts payable experiences fewer exceptions and faster cycle times. * Procurement gains clearer visibility into total cost at the point of decision. * Finance leadership holds a more defensible, audit-ready tax position. In short, you trade reactive cleanup for proactive control and free your teams to focus on higher-value work like strategic sourcing and supplier management, an area covered in more depth in its Procurement & Cost Transformation work. Looking ahead. Tax shouldn't be something you reconstruct at the end of the month. It should be part of the transaction itself. Cross Connect is designed to make that change practical, bringing tax into the process where it belongs, with the control and confidence finance leaders expect. If your purchase-side tax still lives outside the transaction, it's worth a closer look. To see how Cross Connect for AvaTax can close the use tax gap inside your Coupa environment, contact CrossCountry today. Connect with an expert. Harpreet narula. Coupa Practice Lead Contributing authors. Tanner Kilam Jay Butxton

Tailored for growth: how AS Colour reimagined tax exemption. 15/07/2026 Tired of scrolling? Download a PDF version for easier offline reading and sharing with coworkers. Key highlights: * AS Colour transformed one of its most manual wholesale workflows into a faster, self-service experience. * Wholesale customers can now manage tax exemption certificates online and maintain tax-exempt status across multiple authorized users. * The new process reduced tax-exempt onboarding from days to minutes while improving certificate accuracy. * Cleaner customer data and fewer manual touchpoints help AS Colour's internal teams work more efficiently. * The project demonstrates how the right technology partners can simplify complex B2B experiences. Quality is in the details. For AS Colour, quality has always been more than the finished product. Since 2005, the brand has built its reputation on premium apparel blanks, growing from a supplier for the music industry into a global business serving screen printers, embellishers, corporate buyers, and other wholesale customers. Today, AS Colour operates five warehouses across four countries while continuing to grow its direct-to-consumer business. That growth never changed the company's philosophy. "From the very beginning, doing the right thing was really important for us as a brand," said Joe Sharplin, Head of Ecommerce at AS Colour. "We've always tried to do the best that we can, whether that's through production, the materials we use, auditing factories." As AS Colour expanded, that same commitment to quality reached beyond the products it sold. It also shaped the experience customers had every time they did business with the brand. Working with BigCommerce, Avalara, and Cadent Commerce, AS Colour reimagined one of its most manual wholesale workflows, transforming tax exemption into a faster, self-service experience for wholesale buyers while reducing administrative work behind the scenes. When "good enough" stopped being enough. Growth has a way of exposing the processes that no longer work. For years, AS Colour's tax exemption process got the job done. But as its U.S. wholesale business grew, so did the number of new customers, certificates, approvals, and moving pieces. Getting a new wholesale account ready for tax-exempt purchasing meant manually: * Collecting exemption certificates * Reviewing customer information * Verifying tax status across applicable states * Uploading documentation into Avalara * Confirming every exemption was tied to the correct customer account None of those steps were unusual on their own. Together, however, they created days of back-and-forth before a customer could place a tax-exempt order. "It wasn't a very nice experience for our customers. There was a lot of back and forth, collecting the correct tax certificates, loading them in, checking all the details. It was a very manual job." - Joe Sharplin, Head of Ecommerce, AS Colour Then the challenge grew. AS Colour wanted to give wholesale customers the flexibility of multiple buyers under a single business account. But the company's existing tax exemption process wasn't designed to extend tax-exempt status across every authorized user. Solving that challenge would require more than improving an existing workflow. It would require rethinking it altogether. A stronger experience, built together. The answer wasn't another manual workaround. It was a better process. Working with BigCommerce, Avalara, and Cadent Commerce, AS Colour redesigned its tax exemption workflow from the ground up. The goal wasn't simply to digitize paperwork. It was to create a self-service experience that made onboarding easier for wholesale customers while reducing the administrative burden on internal teams. Built on BigCommerce's flexible B2B architecture and Avalara's Exemption Certificate Management platform, the custom integration gives wholesale customers more visibility and control over their tax exemption status. Customers can now: * Upload and manage tax exemption certificates directly from their account * View their exemption status across applicable states * Maintain tax-exempt status across multiple authorized users within the same business account * Complete onboarding with fewer manual touchpoints The integration also improves the experience behind the scenes. Customer information submitted through the new workflow is more complete, helping AS Colour's finance team review and approve certificates more efficiently. "The support from BigCommerce and the agency was great, and the whole thing was pretty smooth." - Joe Sharplin, Head of Ecommerce, AS Colour From bottleneck to breakthrough. The impact was immediate. What once took multiple days of emails, paperwork, and approvals could now happen in a single session. For AS Colour, that translated into measurable improvements: * Reduced tax-exempt wholesale onboarding from days to minutes * Achieved a 90%+ accuracy rate on submitted tax certificates * Delivered the custom integration from kickoff to production in approximately six weeks The rollout also revealed just how much demand existed for a simpler process. "All of a sudden, people were going: 'I can upload a certificate now.' It was like there was an unblock on our customers, as well," said Sharplin. The benefits extended beyond wholesale customers. With cleaner customer data and fewer manual touchpoints, AS Colour's finance team now spends less time managing certificates and more time supporting the company's continued growth. The final word. Every growing B2B business reaches a point where manual processes start getting in the way of the customer experience. For AS Colour, rethinking tax exemption created a faster, more intuitive onboarding process for wholesale buyers while reducing administrative work for internal teams. What began as a custom solution is now available in the BigCommerce App Marketplace, making it easier for other B2B businesses to simplify tax exemption management without building a custom integration from scratch. This story is just one piece of AS Colour's ecommerce journey. Read the full case study to see how the brand uses BigCommerce to power both wholesale and direct-to-consumer experiences, support global expansion, and deliver the same attention to detail across every customer touchpoint. Isn't about time that you evaluated your ecommerce platform?

Chicago software company plants flag in Seattle area as new leadership team seeks AI talent. by John Cook on Jul 7, 2026 at 7:57 am Enterprise software company LogicGate is establishing a Bellevue, Wash., office and rapidly expanding its Seattle-area executive team, betting on the region's deep technology talent pool as it embarks on a new chapter under newly appointed CEO Diego Panama. The Chicago-based governance, risk and compliance software company recently signed a lease in Bellevue with space for up to 25 employees and expects to have about 20 people working there by the end of the year. It also recently recruited two Seattle-area executives to its leadership team: veteran marketing executive Michael Schultz as chief marketing officer and David Rostov as chief financial officer, whose appointment is being announced today. "The tech talent market here is really second to none," said Panama, the former LiveRamp and Microsoft sales leader who took the helm of the company in April. "As we looked to create a hub with a vibrant office culture, Bellevue is really a stand-out option." The expansion comes as Panama succeeds co-founder Matt Kunkel in a planned leadership transition that the company hopes will position LogicGate for its next phase of growth. "We are eyes wide open - this is hard to get right - and really proud/excited about how we are going about it," said Panama. One of his main goals as CEO is to transform LogicGate from a cloud-based software-as-a-service business into an AI-centric company where agents and humans work seamlessly together. Founded in 2015 and now employing about 200 globally, LogicGate develops governance, risk and compliance software used by enterprises to manage regulatory, cybersecurity and operational risk. Rostov is a longtime Seattle technology finance executive who previously served as CFO at Avalara and Identity Digital before co-founding Aurion Biotech. Based in Seattle, he will oversee LogicGate's finance and legal organizations while helping expand the company's Pacific Northwest operations. "We have a leadership team that can match the ambition of what we're creating at LogicGate," Panama said in a statement. Rostov said he was drawn by both the market opportunity and the company's strategy around AI. "Enterprise GRC is at an inflection point, and companies need a trusted AI-focused platform that scales alongside their risk and compliance demands," he said in a statement. The Bellevue office reflects the company's belief that the Seattle region's concentration of enterprise software, cloud computing and AI talent can help fuel its next stage of growth as it expands both its leadership team and its AI capabilities. LogicGate's investment also adds another enterprise software company to a growing roster of firms choosing the Seattle area as a base for executive leadership, alongside engineering and product talent. GeekWire's engineering center list now includes more than 100 companies with outposts in the region.