TheGrint offers a comprehensive golf app for players of every skill level, with score tracking, GPS distances, official handicap management, and a smartwatch companion that keeps golfers connected to their game on the course.
The platform also runs TheGrint Tour, building community and competition among golfers nationwide. As TheGrint grew across both its SaaS subscriptions and hard goods ecommerce business, sales tax compliance grew right along with it. Today, the company is registered and filing in 31 states, with Kintsugi managing the process across both sides of the business, integrated with both Shopify and Stripe.
The Complexity of Multi-Stream Compliance
From a sales tax perspective, TheGrint’s business is complex. They sell app subscriptions through Stripe, and tangible goods through Shopify. They needed a sales tax compliance solution that could manage two different sales channels and transaction flows, and different product categories and tax treatments.
James Brunone, VP of Hard Goods & Commercial Strategy at TheGrint, joined the company in 2023 and took ownership of the project. Before Kintsugi, TheGrint relied on a private tax attorney and manual processes to manage sales tax. It worked, but it was a heavy lift, and Shopify was a newer part of the business that added even more complexity.
"We wanted something that could integrate our software sales and our hard goods business all together," Brunone said.
TheGrint became one of Kintsugi's early clients, with James working directly with the team to help shape the integrations and API as they were being built.
Addressing Unique Sales Tax Needs with Kintsugi
With TheGrint’s team size, the company needed a solution that could run in the background, without constant attention.
"We can't have a full-time person spending all their time on this and that’s what it would take with how much traffic we have," Brunone explained. The priority was a platform that could be as white glove and hands-off as possible, without sacrificing accuracy. They found their answer in Kintsugi.
Onboarding was straightforward. As one of Kintsugi’s earliest customers, TheGrint played a key role in shaping the platform, sharing feedback on the dashboard and reporting features, requesting additional data columns, and other feedback that made its way directly into the product.
Fixing the Past for a Streamlined Future
Part of what made the partnership valuable early on was Kintsugi's willingness to look backward, not just forward. Previously, TheGrint had gaps in how sales tax was being handled before switching, and Kintsugi helped identify and correct those issues as part of the transition, rather than leaving TheGrint to carry that risk forward.
“Kintsugi helped us catch up so we could move forward from a solid foundation,” Brunone said.
Cutting Sales Tax Compliance Hours by 80%
The results show up most clearly in how little time James Brunone now spends on sales tax. What used to take 5 to 7 hours a month has dropped to roughly 1 to 2 hours, almost all of it concentrated at the start of the month, when James reviews the prior month's tax picture and approves filings.
"I'm surprised at how hands-off I can be," he said. "I thought I would need to babysit the process a lot more, but trust is huge, and I trust the Kintsugi platform a lot."
Across both Stripe and Shopify, Kintsugi pulls in the correct tax rate for each customer's jurisdiction at checkout and applies it automatically, giving TheGrint one consistent source of truth across two very different sales channels. And Kintsugi has taken on all the heavy lifting required for registering and filing in their 31 states.
Built to Scale With the Business
For a company managing both subscriptions and ecommerce under one roof, sales tax compliance could easily have become a distraction, if not a full-on bottleneck for growth. Instead, TheGrint has been able to stay focused on building its platform and growing its community of golfers, while Kintsugi handles the compliance work in the background.
"It really frees us up to focus on the business and not the compliance," Brunone said. "It takes all of the thinking out of it for us as operators, and it adds a lot of trust to that piece of the business so we can focus on our strategy and our way forward."