Tax software company Avalara plans to further disrupt the status quo in what they call the ‘scintillating’ world of sales tax management by pivoting hard to Blockchain technology solutions for the industry.
According to a report in Accounting Today from writer Michael Cohn, Avalara executive vice president of engineering Peter Horadan compared it to innovations like the cell phone.
“It’s not just about financial transactions or Bitcoin,” Horadan said during Avalara’s Crush New Orleans conference Wednesday. “It’s something that can be adapted to the work that we all do and it may affect the future of how we do our jobs.”
He noted that Nasdaq has begun trading securities using Blockchain.
“Ultimately Blockchain is a shared public ledger,” said Horadan.
“What’s happened is that the technology has really grown beyond Bitcoin because people have realized this technology has great application beyond Bitcoin itself,” said Horadan. “It can actually transform a whole bunch of business processes.” The blockchain tracks ownership and has properties such as synchronization. “We have a shared ledger where we all have a view of the ledger,” said Horadan. “Imagine us all looking at this set of journal entries and we can all see the same thing.”
“When we get up every day, we know we’re swimming with the current, and we’re trying to accelerate the inevitable,” said McFarlane. “We all know this is going to be automated over time. Nobody’s going to be doing what we do in manual fashion 10 years from now or 15 years from now. All we try to do is get out there and accelerate what’s happening.”
