The $1M Sales Tax Wake-Up Call
Crossing $1 million in revenue doesn’t just change your balance sheet; it changes your visibility. New states start watching. New obligations appear. New risks take shape.
In other words, you’ve just merged onto the highway of multistate compliance.
Your business has momentum, your customers believe in you, and growth is no longer hypothetical. It’s happening.
But here’s the catch: once you hit this faster road, sales tax stops being background noise. It becomes a risk multiplier.
Each new customer, product, and platform expands your footprint, and every state adds its own rules, rates, and reporting requirements. What once felt simple can quickly feel like navigating a maze of thresholds, tolls, and detours that keep changing.
That’s what DiAndria (Dee) Green (the author of this guest blog) calls The SALTy Road. The long, winding journey of state and local tax (SALT) compliance. The faster you grow, the more intentional you have to be about how you navigate it.
This isn’t about filing more tax returns. It’s about creating a sales tax strategy that scales with your growth; not one that stalls it.
Sales tax is like road infrastructure. If you ignore it, you’ll hit potholes: penalties, audits, or even full stops. But if you build the right compliance engine, it runs quietly in the background, supporting every mile of growth.
The key? People + Platforms working together. Automation may power the vehicle, but people steer it, and oversight keeps it roadworthy.
Judgment steers the journey. People prevent mistakes by:
That’s why people—trusted advisors—remain critical. They’re the navigators and GPS on the SALTy Road, providing direction, context, and course corrections that automation alone can’t deliver.
Automation powers momentum. Platforms prevent inefficiencies.
Automation is a game-changer…but it’s not autopilot. Even the best software needs human setup, configuration, and on-going management. The idea that you can “turn on” a sales tax solution and walk away is one of the biggest misconceptions in compliance.
Automated sales tax software is not “set it and forget it.”
Here’s why that approach fails:
On the SALTy Road, platforms are your engine. They provide the horsepower for speed, accuracy, and scale. But without people in the driver’s seat, even the best engine can take the wrong exit.
Automation is powerful, but people make it precise.
Visibility keeps you road-ready. Oversight ties it all together by:
Oversight is the dashboard; the feedback loop connecting people and platforms. It keeps the compliance engine calibrated, adaptive, and transparent.
Most companies feel the friction between $1M and $5M. That moment when compliance starts competing with growth.
If you’re still filing manually, the time sink is real. If your tax setup hasn’t been reviewed in a year, your exposure risk is rising. If automation is misconfigured, you’re scaling errors instead of efficiency.
That’s your cue to reassess your compliance engine. Technology alone isn’t transformation, it’s translation. It takes what your people know (or what they don’t know) and scale it.
A growing software company hit $1.3M and thought automation would solve everything. They registered in 25 states “just in case.”
The result? They over-registered, overpaid tax in non-taxable states, and triggered unnecessary audits.
Once a trusted advisor stepped in:
✅ Audit nexus and exposure annually.
✅ Fix the past before automating.
✅ Match your platform to your complexity.
✅ Document compliance workflows.
✅ Reassess automation at every growth milestone.
Rule of Thumb: Strategy first. Automation second. Oversight always.
As revenue climbs, so does visibility, and so does responsibility. At $1M and beyond, every sale, system, and state matters more.
But when people, platforms, and oversight move together, sales tax stops being a roadblock and becomes part of your growth strategy.
Because the SALTy Road isn’t really about tax. It’s about trust.
People keep you on course. Platforms keep you moving. Oversight keeps you safe.
That’s the power of collaboration. And the future of sales tax success for growing companies.
Stay on the SALTy Road. Drive forward with clarity, compliance, and confidence.
Join the Webinar, How to Future-Proof Your Sales Tax Setup in 2026, where you’ll learn how to identify your automation inflection point, mitigate exposure through a hybrid approach to sales tax, and build scalable, audit-ready compliance for the miles ahead.
DiAndria Green (The SALTy Lawyer)
DiAndria "Dee" Green is a Partner in Bennett Thrasher's State & Local Tax practice and a nationally recognized sales tax strategist. Known as @SALTyLawyerDee, she makes complex tax issues clear and actionable. Check out her LinkedIn profile.
Dee will be attending TaxValet’s upcoming webinar as a panelist alongside experts from TaxValet and CereTax. Together, they’ll shed light on where sales tax automation is valuable, where and why human oversight is still critical, and how to adopt a hybrid approach that protects your compliance.