Gourmet chocolatier reclaims 100+ hours a year with Avalara solutions and was one of the first customers to beta test Avalara Aviator

DURHAM, N.C., Oct. 22, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Avalara, Inc., the agentic AI leader in global tax and compliance, today announced that Fran’s Chocolates, a Seattle-based gourmet chocolatier, has automated its multistate sales tax compliance with Avalara and was among the first customers worldwide that tested Avalara Aviator, the company’s newly unveiled agent hub for tax and compliance.

For years, Fran’s Chocolates had little reason to worry about multistate sales tax compliance. That changed as the company’s e-commerce and wholesale businesses grew across the country and the Wayfair decision expanded states’ authority to enforce economic nexus rules. As Fran’s crossed nexus thresholds in more jurisdictions, manual compliance processes became harder to manage, highlighting the need for deeper tax expertise and a more scalable approach.

To keep pace, the company implemented Avalara AvaTax to automate tax calculations across jurisdictions, Avalara Managed Returns to handle filing and remittance, and Avalara Exemption Certificate Management (ECM) to track and validate exemption certificates.

The results have been significant: Fran’s Chocolates reduced reliance on additional full-time employees, saving up to $120,000 annually in salary and benefits, and reclaimed more than 100 hours a year by automating tax classification across a catalog of more than 900 SKUs, including the 40 to 60 new products it typically introduces annually. Automated, jurisdiction-specific tax reporting has also helped shorten the company’s financial close cycles.

“Economic nexus rules are always changing, and keeping up with them used to mean hours of manual cross-checking,” said Ken Harrison, Senior Accountant at Fran’s Chocolates. “Avalara helps us see where we’re approaching nexus before it becomes a problem, and recently using Avalara Aviator has shown us how much further that early warning can go. The agent does the scanning, and we decide what to act on.”

That foundation of accuracy and automation positioned Fran’s Chocolates to move quickly into agentic AI. As part of the Avalara Aviator beta process, Harrison put the hub’s orchestrator agent, Avi, to work on real, day-to-day compliance questions, including:

• Analyzing transactions for shipping and destination-address discrepancies
• Reviewing the company’s exemption certificate portfolio for expired or invalid certificates
• Classifying new confectionery products against the correct tax code
• Building side-by-side tax liability comparisons across fiscal periods and states

Work that traditionally meant combing through transaction grids line-by-line was surfaced for review in a fraction of the time, with Harrison retaining full control over which findings to act on.

Having built a mature compliance foundation with Avalara AvaTax, Avalara Managed Returns, and Avalara Exemption Certificate Management, Fran’s Chocolates’ early Avalara Aviator results give Harrison’s team a head start on turning agentic AI into everyday tools for exception review, audit preparation, and multistate reporting.

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.

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SOURCE Avalara, Inc.