ShipCompliant helps Carriage House Imports cut time spent on state reporting from 160 hours to about an hour per month.
Carriage House Imports is a family business with many years of experience and a long record of successful marketing strategies and executions. Carriage House represents and partners with fine wine and spirit brands to help grow and expand the footprint of those brands. Carriage House imports approximately 530,000 cases of wine and spirits (as of 2019) and distributes in all 50 states.
Before ShipCompliant, two of Carriage House’s accountants were taking time away from their principal responsibilities to spend up to two weeks each month handling monthly gallonage reports—by hand, using pen and paper. This was not only an onerous burden for the accounting team, but impacted strategic decisions across the business when those accountants were unavailable to crunch numbers to inform other important decision making and tasks. On top of that, registering new products and keeping track of which licenses were expiring added additional time to their plates. Consequently, two accounting staffers were spending six months out of the year filling out tax forms and managing registrations and licenses instead of helping the business grow through providing product data and analysis.
Two accountants had to set aside their primary responsibilities to manually complete state reporting every month, taking time away from conducting research and analysis to support strategic business decisions.
Keeping track of licenses and when they expire, need to be renewed or paid was complex and time-consuming, making the business vulnerable to penalties and fines.
A trusted industry resource recommended ShipCompliant to Carriage House to help them streamline their state reporting process and get their products to market quicker. Since adopting ShipCompliant 3-Tier with AutoFile, Carriage House Imports has increased visibility into reporting, eliminated the timeconsuming process of manually filling out pieces of paper, and mitigated risk by ensuring the correct tax rate is remitted on all submitted reports.
In addition, Carriage House now gets their products to market quickly and more efficiently with ShipCompliant’s LabelVision making it easy to research trademarks, analyze industry trends and competitors, and manage product labels all in one place.
Efficiency really is immeasurable. To take something from two weeks to an hour, it’s quite significant savings.
ShipCompliant offers comprehensive solutions for importers like Carriage House Imports to manage their compliance operations. ShipCompliant handles the complexities of compliance by increasing accuracy, centralizing compliance processes, automating workflows and giving real-time market visibility. By having direct integrations with state and federal agencies and a centralized place to store and submit licenses, COLAs and registrations, ShipCompliant enables importers to focus on growing their business instead of spending time navigating compliance.
The Carriage House team appreciates the efficiency ShipCompliant brings to their compliance operations— allowing them to get products to market faster and enabling them to spend significantly less time on reporting each month, from two people spending two weeks to just one person spending an hour monthly. With key internal resources freed up from filing reports and managing licenses, Carriage House can now dedicate those energies to analyzing their products, brands, market placement, and finances—allowing them to better understand price structures and state-by-state and labelby-label profits.
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