If you sell to resellers, wholesalers, distributors, or other exempt B2B customers, you already know that not every sale is taxable. But an exemption isn't automatic. Your customer has to provide a valid certificate, and you have to collect it, validate it, and keep it on file for as long as that exemption applies.
If a state auditor reviews your transactions and finds an exempt sale without a valid certificate on file, the liability shifts to you. You owe the tax, plus penalties and interest, even if your customer was genuinely exempt. The more exempt customers you have, the more certificates you're responsible for tracking, validating, and renewing before they expire. That's why exemption certificate management (ECM) is so important.
The Impact of Poor ECM
Manual certificate management tends to fall apart quietly, long before anyone notices. Certificates expire without anyone tracking the date. Files get renamed or duplicated. A Tax ID gets transposed during manual entry (see how to verify a tax ID number). A cert sits in a Drive folder, unclassified, because nobody had time to open it. None of this looks like a problem until an audit surfaces it, and by then, the exposure has usually been building for months or years.
A Complete Certificate Management Workflow
Getting certificates into Kintsugi is only half the job. You also need a way to collect the ones you don't have yet, and a way to make sure none of them quietly expire. Kintsugi's ECM, available on the Premium plan, now covers all three: bulk upload for the certificates you already have, direct requests to customers for the ones you don't, and automatic reminders so nothing lapses unnoticed.
Bulk Upload, Now With Clearer Answers
If you manage certificates for a range of exempt customers, resellers, wholesalers, marketplaces, or distributors, you know what the cert pile looks like: a Drive folder of PDFs, a few phone-camera PNGs, some expired certs nobody's noticed, and duplicate records from renamed files.
ECM bulk upload accepts ZIP, PDF, PNG, and JPG, and handles up to 3,000 uploads at a time. Kintsugi extracts the fields with OCR, then validates each cert against a tax-research-curated catalog covering 125 unique certificate types across nearly all US jurisdictions, checking only the fields that actually apply to that certificate's form and state.
Certificates land in one of five buckets: Ready to Approve, Needs Review, Suggested Reject, Duplicate, and Unsupported. Rejected and flagged certs now come with the specific reason attached, like a missing seller name or end date, instead of a black-box status. Customer matches carry a confidence chip (High, Medium, or Low), so you know at a glance when to trust the auto-match and when to double-check it yourself. If two customers tie on the same match, Kintsugi flags it and asks you to pick.
Requesting Certificates Directly From Customers
Bulk upload handles the certificates that you have on hand. For customers who haven't yet sent a certificate, you can request one directly from inside Kintsugi. Pick the customer, select the jurisdictions you need, and Kintsugi emails them a secure link, valid for 60 days. Your customer uploads through a simple landing page, no account required, and the certificate runs through the same OCR and validation pipeline as a bulk upload.
A Request tab tracks every request you've sent, with per-jurisdiction status (Pending, In Review, Approved, Rejected), so a multi-state request doesn't collapse into one vague status. You always know which customer, and which state, still owes you paperwork.
Reminders So Nothing Expires Unnoticed
Untracked certificates eventually expire, and Kintsugi now automatically closes that gap. Configure reminders to go out 30, 15, 7, and 1 days before a certificate expires, plus an optional nudge after it lapses. If a customer hasn't responded to a request, Kintsugi follows up automatically at day 7, 14, 30, and 45. Every email is sent on your behalf, not Kintsugi's, so the customer relationship stays yours. Both reminder types default to off. You turn them on when you're ready.
Built to Earn Your Trust
Three commitments shaped how our ECM infrastructure works:
🔷 The rule book is ours to carry.
Tax-research-curated validation means the per-form, per-jurisdiction logic lives inside the product, down to confirming a certificate was issued to your legal business name and not just any entity you're associated with. Your team stops being the last reviewer who has to remember every state's rules.
🔷 We never silently merge customers.
Bulk upload and certificate requests both auto-match to existing customer records, but Kintsugi never auto-creates a new customer from a cert. If a cert can't be matched with confidence, it lands in Needs Review and asks you to pick.
🔷 Rejected certificates leave a trail.
When you reject a certificate, it's soft-deleted, not gone. The trail you'd need at audit time is built as you go.
You're In Charge
- The system suggests rejections; it doesn't reject on your behalf. Anything in Suggested Reject is still yours to override.
- Auto-match only matches to existing customers. New customers come from your customer record, not from a cert upload.
- When a cert lands in Unsupported because its form isn't in our catalog yet, we still show it to you, and you can still approve it manually.
- We give you a verdict on each cert today. Rule-by-rule receipts for every validation check are coming later this year.
Getting Started
Bulk upload, certificate requests, and automatic reminders are all live today for Premium customers. Coming soon: a Coverage Gaps view that flags exempt sales without a valid certificate on file, so gaps get closed before an audit finds them. We're continuously building new tools that make your daily workflows simpler, smarter, and more powerful, with AI security built into every step. Keep an eye out for updates.
