Results at a glance
In this case study, you'll discover how Numeral, an innovative sales tax compliance platform, used Stable to:
- scale to 9,000 pieces of mail a month without a mailroom.
- offer virtual mail to nearly every customer on its platform.
- turn one of its customers' biggest headaches into one of its most popular features.
Numeral is an AI-native platform for U.S. sales tax, VAT, and GST compliance. Used by thousands of businesses worldwide, Numeral’s capabilities include everything from calculating tax rates at checkout, nexus monitoring, filings and remittance, and more.
"Numeral differentiates itself from competitors by being the white glove solution, where we free you to really set it and forget it," said Hudson Bova, Numeral’s VP of Finance. "We don’t just calculate the tax rates. We collect that money, remit that money, and file for you."
That white-glove service extends to something most business services platforms won't touch: the mail.
How Numeral turned sales tax mail into a product feature
Sales tax generates mail — a lot of it. State and local jurisdiction registration confirmations, rate change bulletins, filing updates, payment failure notices, and more. “States blast our customers with letters,” said Maggie Molnar, member of Numeral's compliance team. “Some of them don't require any action while others are really important. It can be overwhelming and unclear.”
Numeral's solution to this problem is to take the envelope out of the customer's hands entirely. “Receiving and managing mail on behalf of customers is one of Numeral’s biggest selling points,” said Emily Coleman, Numeral’s Compliance Lead.
To deliver this service, Numeral partners with Stable. Stable receives and digitizes all Numeral customer mail, typically within 24 hours. From there, any mail that the Numeral team can’t manage themselves is surfaced within the Numeral platform for action by the customer. “Stable feels like a feature in our product, which is incredible,” said Bova.
Scaling sales tax mail management without a physical mailroom
In Numeral's earliest days, the process wasn’t quite so automated. "The mail went to our CEO, who opened it, read, and manually entered the relevant information into our product himself," Bova said.
As admirable as that roll-up-your-sleeves approach is, it wasn’t built for the growth Numeral has experienced since. The company now processes 9,000 pieces of mail a month. They utilize about 4,000 unique Stable virtual addresses, one for each customer enrolled in the virtual mail offering. Bova is unambiguous about what an alternative would have required. “We'd have a bunch of hands opening up mail and processing it, or we'd have some sort of scanning technology, but it'd be far more manual and capital intensive."
Molnar has seen that version firsthand. Before Numeral, she worked at a payroll company that also handled mail on behalf of its clients — through a P.O. box. "Someone went to that P.O. box every day and had to scan and upload each piece of mail," she said. "That's how they'd been doing it for 20-plus years. It was so much manual work."
Replicating that model at Numeral's scale would mean maintaining P.O. boxes across the country and staffing them indefinitely.
"As VP of Finance, Stable saved the day for me," Bova said, "because we don't have to employ a ton of people to be able to offer this."
Automating tax mail workflows with OCR and routing
Daniel Corcio heads Numeral’s mail team, which reviews and routes every piece of mail digitized by Stable. No one has a deeper understanding of Numeral’s mail workflows, and how Stable supports them, than him. "We receive all sorts of mail and it isn’t always easy to categorize," he said. His team leveraged Stable’s optical character recognition (OCR) to build a categorization scheme based on text pulled from every scan, and subcategories based on the letter itself. Workflows are then automatically triggered when the mail item is correctly categorized.
Checks were another unlock. Stable detects checks in scans, which lets Corcio's team confirm the mailing address and recipient with the client and ship the check where the client wants it. That matters more than it might sound on the surface. "Sometimes clients move locations, and if you have a legal address set in the portal for a jurisdiction, the state will simply ship it to the legal address," Corcio said. With Stable, Numeral has a 30-day window to redirect it.
Corcio’s experience also makes his feedback invaluable to Stable. Two of his requests — an address book that holds thousands of shipping destinations rather than the most recently used few, and a filter for when a check was issued — were delivered to every customer.
“The Stable team has been a great partner for us across the board,” Bova added. “We want it to be a long-term partnership for what has become core infrastructure at the business.”
Why nearly every Numeral customer opts into virtual mail
The clearest measure of how well this partnership works for Numeral is the opt-in rate of their customers. "I want to say it's nearly one hundred percent," Bova said. Molnar agreed, "It's pretty rare to see someone refuse it."
"The clients that do opt out and get all of their own mail are the ones that have to reach out to CX when they get a mail notice because they don't know what to do with it," Coleman said.
Peace of mind is one of the major reasons why customers opt-in so readily. “Customers like knowing that we're getting mail, we’re handling it, and we’ll let them know if there’s anything we need them to do. It's such a load off.”
Molnar pointed to filing frequency changes, which many states still communicate only on paper, as an example of this in action. Her team catches the letter, updates the filing frequency, "and then we don't miss a period and therefore potentially have liability for filing late for a customer."
"Numeral puts sales tax on autopilot," Coleman said in conclusion. "What Stable allows us to do with the mail is very much in that spirit."
Choosing a virtual mail partner for tax compliance
Numeral was one of Stable's first platform partners, and Bova has a clear view of what companies considering the same model should look for.
“You want a partner who is reliable, who you can put into your processes and feel like it’s an extension of your team and of your product,” he said. “Secondarily, you want to work with a partner who understands and supports what you’re trying to achieve as a business. We’ve had that with Stable.”
The ongoing working relationship is an important part of that. "Daryl (Numeral’s Success Manager) has been fabulous to work with — always super communicative," Coleman said. “I would absolutely recommend Stable."
Molnar's endorsement may be the most persuasive of all. Her own father became a Stable customer after learning about it from her. "When they moved from Texas to Oregon for retirement, my dad decided he didn’t want to receive any more mail," she said with a laugh. "I've even thought of signing up myself."
Interested in offering Stable as a virtual mail solution for your customers? Set up a time to chat here.
