The Lab Depot Cuts Tax Compliance to One Hour a Month with Avalara

Laboratory supplies distributor automates sales tax across 31 states and reduces costs while also becoming an early adopter of Avalara Aviator agentic hub

DURHAM, N.C., Nov. 10, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- Avalara, Inc., the agentic AI leader in global tax and compliance, announced that The Lab Depot, a distributor and retailer of laboratory supplies and equipment, has used Avalara to scale its sales tax compliance obligations from three states to 31 without adding headcount.

Founded in 1990 in Dawsonville, Georgia, The Lab Depot serves the life sciences, industrial science, and manufacturing sectors across the U.S. and Canada. Before adopting Avalara in 2016, the company managed sales and use tax manually. The process was slow and labor-intensive: when California auditors requested records, it took The Lab Depot's team three months to gather them.

The company's tax complexity only grew from there. The South Dakota v. Wayfair, Inc. Supreme Court decision, followed by a pandemic-driven surge in ecommerce sales, dramatically increased the number of states where The Lab Depot had sales tax obligations, making automation a necessity rather than an option.

The Lab Depot selected Avalara over competitor TaxJar for its competitive pricing and its ability to integrate with both the company's Adobe Commerce storefront and its Epicor Prophet 21 ERP system. With Avalara AvaTax calculating sales tax, Avalara Exemption Certificate Management letting customers upload certificates at checkout, and Avalara Managed Returns automating filing and remittance across all 31 states, The Lab Depot has its two-person accounting team now handling all compliance in-house. Monthly tax reconciliation and filing, once a days-long undertaking, now takes only about an hour.

"We would have to have two or three more people on staff to do what Avalara does," said Jere Allen, Chief Financial Officer at The Lab Depot. "Avalara was one of the smoothest integrations that we've done since I've been here."

The Lab Depot is also an early beta tester of Avalara Aviator, Avalara's agent hub for tax and compliance that brings specialized AI agents into everyday workflows that monitor compliance risk, surface proactive insights, and execute tasks while keeping teams in control.

"The insights in Aviator are fantastic. That piece is powerful, because it's almost like a two-way conversation with the AI. Instead of it just being an output, it's actually making recommendations," Allen said.

Learn more about how Avalara customers are transforming their tax and compliance obligations.

About Avalara

Avalara is the agentic AI leader in global tax and compliance. For more than two decades, Avalara's trusted tax content, deep compliance expertise, proprietary data, and technology have helped customers succeed on a global scale. Avalara now pairs that foundation with agentic AI to help businesses execute complex compliance work while keeping people in control. Avalara processes more than 54 billion AvaTax API calls annually and supports millions of businesses worldwide. For more information, visit Avalara.com.

SOURCE Avalara, Inc.