Sai Avula

Executive summary

Sai Avula is a Managing Director in Grant Thornton’s Tax Services practice, providing indirect tax automation services to companies across the U.S. He has extensive experience in systems implementation and automation of indirect taxes (VAT, GST, US sales h use taxes). His primary focus is implementation of indirect tax determination and reporting with in the ERP systems (like SAP, Oracle, NetSuite etc) or Procurement platforms (Ariba, Coupa etc) or Billing platforms. A lot of these implementations often involve integration with a 3rd party tax engines like Vertex, Avalara, Sovos and OneSource Determination ( fka Sabrix) and Sai has extensive experience working with all of these leading tax engines and their various solutions.

Sai has helped clients with indirect tax software vendor selection process which involves working with the client to understand their needs and laying out all possible options and help them select an option that best fits their needs. Sai served as a tax lead on several tax system implementations. He is very detail oriented and is involved in all phases of the project. This includes the requirements analysis, design, customization, configuration, testing and support of these tax solutions. His background provides a unique combination of technology skills, including application development and infrastructure planning, as well as a deep tax technical understanding of the complexities around sales, use and VAT taxes.

Professional qualifications and memberships

• CMI
• PMP

Community involvement

• Angels among us. Pet rescue.

Presentations and publications

• Sovos Regional Seminars
• Vertex Exchange
• Onesource local seminars/webinars

Education

• Masters in Information Systems, Bentley University
• Bachelors in Engineering, BITS Pilani.