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 8.6 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
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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.
Our rep stepped in and took on her role very well in getting tax issues resolved. She makes sure she answers every question & follows up with us on any tax related issues that we may have or come across. Our rep is very communicable & reliable. She hits every point when we meet & reassures us of her getting things done.
I find Avalara well-suited in the majority of situations when it comes to tax calculation. The only issues we run into are with more complex tax situations. It may be less appropriate for invoices that have significant variability that affects taxability. For example, if there is a business that sometimes is an installer and other times is not, there may need to be different tax codes set up for each situation. This requires the users to know how tax needs to be charged in different situations, rather than having Avalara do this automatically.
Timely tax payments which are processed through transmition of our periodic files.
The reports provided to help in the quarterly balancing process. Additionally, we are able to transmit files early (prior to quarter end) which provides more time.
The reports that are available showing our company profiles and account numbers.
ADP works well with integrating Smart Compliance and SAP.
The IPay Admin website for W-2c makes the process easy. The reports are great when balancing to the amendment files that have been sent. It's a good process.
ADP does a good job with issuing our W-2s. The reports are good and easy to use for balancing. Being able to create test W-2s each quarter is helpful.
Has extensive research and documentation on telecommunications industry
Research is always up to date
The ability to ask questions and get clarification on specific situations with no limit as to how you ask a question and often get the answer the same day
Amended returns can be extremely difficult to find and work with, especially Q4 because everything, including W-2c's, are lumped together in one PDF with all other jurisdictions.
We have a lot of unusual tax situations. Employment Tax has limited capability to adjust to some of these needs, which has resulted in a few significant penalties.
Employment Tax does not readily allow any adjustments. For the most part, which is sent to them is exactly what is processed, even if some adjustments are needed in between from time to time. In other words, we have lack of control in what is processed and paid.
Invoicing system regularly requires overpayment of taxes in certain situations, which many times means waiting for the jurisdiction to refund and ties up cash. Such required overpayments are many times non-negotiable.
Employment Tax system is inflexible (more so than their full-service, I'm told) and forcing the system to not charge for taxes we are not liable can take a long time. The worst example is that we are not responsible for Massachusetts' EMAC, but the system automatically assumed we were liable, paid it and charged us for two years before a workaround could be found. Tweaking programming on the back end in their system to account for things like this is never an option.
Not all returns are available in ADP SmartCompliance but must be requested separately and sent by our rep.
The entire ADP system is slow enough that responding to jurisdiction notices in time to avoid penalties can be problematic.
From time to time, returns are inaccurate and/or not filed at all. Rarely payments are skipped but it has happened. ADP usually takes care of late penalties if they are small and 100% their fault but larger penalties can be difficult to negotiate.
A .txt file extra character sent to ADP SmartCompliance can result in only partial data being sent to a jurisdiction but we receive confirmation that the entire file was sent.
Employment Tax will not file mandatory FLI reporting when SUI reporting is not required, so we have to do that ourselves.
Details behind service invoice line items are not always transparent.
There is no other option on the table for us at the moment to go with a different vendor. We also have had very little issues processing with ADP that would make us want to look for a new vendor.
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.
Avalara is hands down the best product available when it comes to what they offer, the robustness of their systems, and the diversity of their offerings. -All while being very cost-competitive. Avalara's tech is best in class while providing a total solution and integration between products and our systems, making processes much more convenient.
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.
In my experience, numerous questions, and particularly those regarding billing issues are just ignored, and it is impossible to get to someone to discuss. Your account manager will tell you they are taking care of it and then it just goes into a black hole.
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.
Exceptional Services Received during 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.
The implementation team from Avalara was very knowledgable and did a good job of passing along information so that we could maintain the system and be able to make future changes ourselves. We had asked for some custom tax setup and they worked with us to get additional taxes set up that they didn't previously have. They worked with us to pull our documentation on tax rules and make sure those were included. I had hoped more scenarios would be there out of the box to cut down on the configuration time.
ADP SmartCompliance was easily integrated with WFN and all of our employee data was in one place. We saw this as an advantage instead of having to log into multiple platforms, everything was quickly accessible to respond to a VOE or claim.
TaxJar is integrated with Kaseya autotask, and this integration is very inefficient and was not easy to set up. Neither TaxJar nor Kaseya support was helpful at all, "rude" is the only word to describe that, whereas Avalara has always tried to be helpful and has been very friendly to work with. TaxJar has no similar capability to retain their tax-calculated transactions and file the returns; TaxJar would calculate the taxes in Kaseya autotask and you would still have to manually import the data into TaxJar if you wanted to subscribe and have them file your returns. Needless to say that was a non-starter.
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.
