As to the latter he said, “Our new system will ease the burden for new customers” by mapping SKUs to determine taxability. The ability to automate the process of maintaining the company’s taxation database is what he called “a game changer”.  Previously, keeping data such as rates and boundaries of taxing authorities up to date has been largely manual and that has been a huge tax—there were almost 300,000 updates to the Avatax calculating engine last year, McFarlane said. Now, he said, “We are excited we can source sales and use tax rates for most states at the click of a button.” He described the the company as close to releasing the capability to "automate much of the maintenance of taxation.” McFarlane said updates to technology include an artificial intelligence back-end and better search technology to the lookup tool. Much of these capabilities stemmed from technology obtained through last year’s acquisition of Indix.  McFarlane said Indix’s technology is extremely robust and for example it had classified  2 billion products with all of their attributes that affect taxability.