Cloud-Based Sales Tax: Stripe Acquires TaxJar – What to Expect?

Stripe – a digital payments company with a similar business model to PayPal – has recently made a major acquisition designed to expand on the products and services that the company offers. In order to add a suite of cloud-based tax services to the payment services that Stripe provides, the company has purchased TaxJar – a popular service that allows for the automatic calculation, reporting, and filing of sales taxes. 

While the details of the purchase have not been fully disclosed, we know that TaxJar was valued at $179 million the last time the company raised money. It’s a steep price for Stripe to pay, but it is also an investment with a lot of promise, given that a large percentage of Stripe’s customer base is small business owners who stand to benefit from the convenient sales tax services that TaxJar provides. 

In addition to integrating TaxJar’s technology into its platform, Stripe has announced that the company plans to hire all 200 of TaxJar’s Woburn, Massachusetts-based employees. The company has also announced that customers will be able to continue using TaxJar through the TaxJar app and website in addition to using the TaxJar tools that are integrated into the Stripe platform. 

For business owners who rely on Stripe to accept credit card payments, this acquisition is exciting news. Since TaxJar is designed to work across a number of different sales tax regimes, it’s able to take the guesswork out of calculating and filing sales taxes. This is especially useful for business owners who sell products online since sales tax laws vary from location to location, making sales tax calculating and reporting a real chore for businesses selling products to customers all over the country. 

In fact, Stripe has admitted that sales tax collection and remittance have long been one of the most requested features among Stripe’s users. Now that Stripe has acquired TaxJar, though, this is one request that the company will soon be able to fulfill.