SME News Southern Enterprise Awards 2023 | 6 eCommerce Accountants of the Year 2023 – Hampshire AVASK Accounting & Business Consultants Ltd began almost eleven years ago, originally starting out as an international e-commerce accounting firm, and became the first tax provider to receive a five-star rating on Amazon SPN. To date, the team have assisted more than 10,000 e-commerce entrepreneurs globally, and combined, speak over 23 of the world’s most popular languages. Teams are located worldwide but are all united under the AVASK founding principle, ‘to offer simple and uncomplicated solutions to enable e-commerce sellers to grow and adapt to the myriad of compliance changes in the e-commerce eco-system.’ We speak with Tax Director and Partner Melanie Shabangu, to learn more about how the company operates so effectively on a global scale, aiding tens of thousands of happy customers from Southampton to Shanghai, and beyond. Relatively early into the AVASK journey, the company recognised that it could offer so much more to its clients than just manage their accounts and taxes, pivoting to include an array of additional services. Every service that the team has developed has been designed to provide uncomplicated solutions for e-commerce sellers, in turn allowing them to grow and expand cross-borders much in the same way as AVASK itself has done. The company’s global headquarters is situated in the heart of Southampton, but as a result of expansion, additional offices are now located in London, Paris, Frankfurt, Madrid, Milan, Amsterdam, Warsaw, Prague, New York, Hangzhou, and Shanghai. Such expansion has also bared witness to the natural evolution of the company’s services, which are currently classified across a number of key sectors, Accounting & Bookkeeping Services, Indirect Taxes (VAT and US Sales Tax, for example), Customs & International Trade, Shipping and Logistics, Online Marketplace Indirect Taxes (a special sub-division which focuses on the needs of clients filing taxes via their online marketplaces), Eco-transition Services (new government schemes and taxes designed to reduce carbon emissions), alongside the e-commerce consulting, strategy, and growth services which are all on offer. 2014 saw AVASK begin its long-time partnership with Amazon, officially joining Amazon SPN. It was this which spurred on the expansion of the business, branching out from the UK headquarters to include LA, Paris, and Frankfurt. This partnership also led to the company attending Amazon run events, and in 2016, one such event the team were invited to in China resulted in the establishing of AVASK offices in Xiamen. Two years later in 2018, the firm joined
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