ADP SmartCompliance is a tax and regulatory compliance platform for midsize or larger companies using an ERP or non-ADP platform for HR and HRMS services.
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Avalara
Score 8.5 out of 10
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Avalara AvaTax connects to the software that businesses already have and delivers sales tax decisions based on precise geo-location in more than 12,000 taxing jurisdictions in the U.S.
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Pricing
ADP SmartCompliance
Avalara
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
ADP SmartCompliance
Avalara
Free Trial
No
No
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
Yes
Yes
Entry-level Setup Fee
Required
Optional
Additional Details
Pricing varies based upon modules deployed and features enabled.
ADP SmartCompliance reduces a great deal of the strain on our department by easily remaining compliant. Particularly with several state and federal demands, payroll compliance can quickly become a struggle; ADP helps us keep all requests and court paperwork in one place. I appreciate how it automates reporting, garnishments, and tax returns to free us from constant concern over missing deadlines or making calculation mistakes. Knowing that things are being correctly handled gives peace of mind, saves time, and lowers double work. With everything being tracked and recorded, it helps reduce back-and-forth while handling notices.
In my opinion, the worst customer service and fraudulent withdrawal from our bank account. We've used Avalara for 3 years. When our renewal came up, we were considering other options. They sent an email stating we had to request a new contract, I sent the request and followed up. There was no response from Avalara so our contract price was unknown. I waited to hear from them and ended up canceling within their window, via the appropriate channels. I followed up multiple times, requesting cancellation confirmation and removal of our bank info (you can't self serve, although you can self serve add it). In my experience, they ignored me for 2 months until I posted publicly about their poor service. I changed our login information and migrated to another platform. In my experience, they withdrew funds from our bank account, the new provider said our taxes weren't paid and the funds are nowhere to be found. Avalara should have never withdrew the funds or billed me after I canceled. Beware of this company, in my opinion, they are non-responsive and unpleasant to deal with.
Local Tax Help - Mainly PA employees. I wish there was an easier way to see that we have the employees setup correctly.
Tickets not in emails - What I mean is that they have a ticket system so that you can talk to your account manager, but there is no easy way to then pull up those tickets like you would if it were in emails. Sometimes we want to see how we handled something before and it gets tricky.
Avalara's State Registrations option is pretty expensive and should be quicker and cheaper
Avalara's State Filing Setup is not coordinated with their State Registrations, so you still have to set up manually what they just registered for you.
Even if Avalara has all of your data, they won't set up a state filing if you miss a deadline of the 20th of the current month they won't file that month, even though they have all of the transactions. (This could happen when a new state is selected for tax calculation but the state registration hasn't been completed yet.) They should allow you to set up the returns by the first of the month it is filed in at the least.
Avalara's extractor is very base and limited; it can't extract multiple lines into Avalara, it takes an entire invoice and inputs it as one line. We were told after frequent calls that it works that way by design. Those out there who file returns on a regular basis can identify the problem with this scenario and why this won't work for tax filing.
ADP displays value continuously by automating compliance processes, reducing risk, and saving time. It ensures that tax filings are accurate, efficient notice management, and seamless integration with payroll systems, which minimizes penalties and manual work. The platforms reliability and strong support make it essential for maintaining compliance within our company and department
Avalara is the best sales tax compliance product on the market. Avalara allows us to accurately comply with our sales and use tax obligations in an accurate and timely manner for a reasonable cost. Avatax is a versatile and helpful product. We also are looking forward to implementing the cross-border product.
For the most part, one can get in and learn how to navigate the system by just clicking on one of the suject areas. If you have a good clientrepresentative, they will inform you of new features/functionality and give you a quick demo. This is helpful for one to go back in and navigate to learn how it works and usefulness.
Overall, Avalara has been an excellent resource for the company. We highly recommend it. Once you get familiar with the software it's not hard to navigate and use for your business' needs. There are reports for any type of tax detail you need from individual jurisdiction detail to a comprehensive summary of all states filing or not filing in.
Availability is good, with only one or two instances of not being able to access the system at all which were quickly fixed. Some features do not work correctly from time to time, such as the "Help" function or the "Sync" function.
If ADP is having issues, they communicate the problem within the solution once you log in. They also communicate that the issue will be fixed promptly. Reports run efficiently and in a reasonable amount of time. Also, the reports allow for various reporting types to be produced like a PDF or a Microsoft Excel file.
We do have trouble tying Avalara's reporting back to our POS, but we just got a new POS system and there are bugs we are still trying to work out within the POS system. I do not believe this is an Avalara issue
As mentioned in the last comment, everyone and everything has been great. However sometimes you get one person that I feel can bring a score down and the current dedicated tax representative I have I do not feel is very supportive.
It does not [matter] how much you pay in support packages for Avalara, [from my experience] you will never receive timely response times. Additionally, [it seems to me] their support techs are not experienced and/or do not understand the nature of your issues. I have resolved the majority of my issues before the support team is able to.
Exceptional Training Services Received during and after our Build . The teams of ADP Professionals assisted on a daily basis with tight deadlines and testing, each day , each Qtr. and annual processes including setting up local and State agencies for the 50 State we are reporting since our Workday go live 4/1/23. The process was seamless.
Online training give us more flexible on timing. We always have a pack schedule and not able to attend training in person. Online training with recording is a good source for us especially we can review it again and again. The down side is we are unable ask question in person
The documentation online we informative and helpful. The videos from the Avalara institute and the help tab if we have any questions and the search too were helpful. We like the ease of using the click here for more information tool about nexus and the information for the ECM Pro training were helpful. Whenever we have a question we normally get an email along with the tool as to where to find our answer. We also like that it shows information about nexus status of the states we maybe approaching and we can look more into it.
I wasn't too hands on with integration portion of this product so I can't completely give an honest answer to that. I have been told that the training improves alot for each individual as they go through the process and it improves success. These individuals are able to do alot more than me in regards to implementation.
The rating of a 6 was not because I was displeased with Avalara's service or implementation team. The implementation process and implementation team were great. The issue I had with implementation was finding the time of an implementation specialist to devote to our account. With the fast growth of Avalara, my specialist always felt rushed which made me feel I did not get adequate time or support.
We reviewed MasterTax and Ceridian before selecting ADP's Employment Tax four years ago. ADP SmartCompliance was selected because it was thought that this solution would save us time and resources. We have since revisited MasterTax and have looked at Asure as well. These companies offer more control and require more manual intervention before returns are filed and payments made as a tradeoff.
When I started with the company, they were using a version of CCH. This was my first experience with that program and I found it very cumbersome. It was unable to calculate multiple tax rates (this may have changed in the last 10 years) and while it filled out some of the tax returns for us, we still had to manipulate many and file them ourselves. Now we just verify that what we show in our system matches Avalara and hit approve and we are done for another month.
ADP has the ability to scale across departments. This was found to be true when we rolled out the wage payment solution. ADP users are able to view their pay stubs on their phones and/or computers. This wage payment portal offers W2 storage and paystub storage for access at any time by an employee.
