With two weeks to go in 2009, Overland Park, Kan.-based BillSoft had tallied 47 new contracts this year for its transaction-based taxation software and services, including eight in the month of November.
In addition to recruiting new customers, the company began work on a new data center where it will house its expanded workforce.
BillSoft provides an end-to-end, fully integrated tax system called Your Total Tax Solution that allows clients to keep all their taxation requirements with one provider. It includes the flagship product, EZTax, a comprehensive transaction tax package with availability in more than 85 countries. The company offers products and services for address scrubbing, jurisdiction assignment, tax rating, tax customization, tax viewing, compliance filing and tax consulting.
We caught up with BillSoft CEO Tim Lopatofsky just before the holiday to talk about his company’s not-so-unusual year.
B/OSS: Congratulations. It appears you’ve had quite a year.
Tim Lopatofsky: It has been a difficult economy. Fortunately, we have been able to grow our business in spite of that. We provide solutions that can be helpful in tough economic times. We make their operation run better and more efficiently and give them the freedom to work on their core businesses.
B/OSS: How specifically?
TL: Among other things, we handle jurisdiction assignment which is big, especially in states like Florida and Colorado. And we do tax filing services and help clients collect taxes as well as remit them. There are complexities and a whole lot of “gotchas” in that process that we have become experts in and help them with.
B/OSS: To what do you owe all your growth this year?
TL: We have had tremendous growth since the company started, so it is not unusual. But as we have gotten bigger, the growth rates have declined. A large part of our continued growth is from adding things customers can put in their cart when they're at our store. When BillSoft started, we offered licensed products primarily for tax calculation for long-distance telecom taxes. Initially, we expanded that to all telecom services, cable services, VoIP services and even outside telecom.
We added address scrubbing, and got into compliance filing services and we also now provide consulting services. If a client is in an audit situation we can help. If they are bringing out new products and services, we can help with the tax ramifications and other things.
B/OSS: What’s next?
TL: From tax calculation to surrounding products, we now offer a total tax solution and we’re expanding that with our EZFile product, which we currently use internally to file returns. In early 2010 we hope to license that product as well. It has been in development for five years.
