Likelihood to Recommend If you have a programmer and are willing to let them learn the system and want software to function the way you run your business this may work well. If you do not have a programmer on staff and are willing to change your business to match the software but think in the future you may wish to modify your ERP software this may work out well. If you want something you can modify quickly this is not a good choice. If you do not wish to modify the code nor your business practices an evaluation would be required. It does allow substantial modifications, but there are areas it may not fit with your business so well. It is possible that Intuitive may happen to make the options you require available in the future.
Read full review I feel Avalara is the best at helping with sales tax needs. I also know they are opening up more areas to help with business needs. Our only drawback is that since we are a retailer that follows a 4-4-5 monthly calendar, it isn't an option to have Avalara process and submit our taxes monthly.
Read full review Pros Easy to Use Low Maintenance Flexible and modifiable Read full review Sales tax rates at a "roof top" level 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 Read full review Cons Documentation. The design of en extensible system works well once you figure it out. Some things can be tricky and time consuming. They provide no support for customizations. I can understand not wanting to help write specific custom code, but they refuse to even tell anyone what a method on a base class does unless you pay them $200 an hour. Their proprietary design can cause modifications to take longer. If you use one of their forms you can not load it, you must call their launch function and put you code in the "Execute" method. If they were more standardized the documentation issue would not be so bad. Read full review I find it virtually impossible to access people when you have issues with anything In my experience, everything runs through account managers and they are non-responsive and unavailable most of the time. In my experience, 99% of all communication with anybody at Avalara has to be done via some ridiculous form or via email. Human contact is extremely difficult to resolve an issue that sometimes requires human to human contact. Read full review Likelihood to Renew We have a lot invested in this from user education to customizations. It would be hard to justify the cost for changing.
Read full review We need their help with filing and keeping track of things. It is very likely we are in the process of renewing right now. Autumn is our case manager and she has been a great help in keeping us updated on our usage and renewal. I feel we will be using this for a very long time.
Read full review Usability Usability is simple and user-friendly. It is a very intuitive product. All their products are easy to use. It is one of the major benefits of their products. The ease and user-friendly interface of their products are a time saver in itself. Our associates are not having to retrain for common tasks to find what they need.
Read full review Reliability and Availability I have been using Avalara for years and do not remember ever having an outage during working hours. The service is accurate and dependable.
Read full review Performance 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
Read full review Support Rating Avalara is not consistent in giving us information timely. For instance, right now, we have a help desk ticket with them that's been open since October. They are still trying to figure it out and we haven't gotten any feedback on where they are at or what is going on. That seems to me a very excessive amount of time to be working on a problem. Was it forgotten? Is there something bigger going on? Do they need something from us? An update would be helpful.
Also, many times when we call with an issue or concern (wrong tax rate for instance) we generally feel like the help desk assumes it's of our doing instead of theirs and doesn't truely listen when we explain the problem because we end up repeating it over and over as well as sending examples. We expect more respect on our end.
Read full review In-Person Training I wasn't here when they first started with Avalara.
Read full review Online Training 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.
Read full review Implementation Rating 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.
Read full review Alternatives Considered We select Aptean 19 years ago, most of the other SMB packages back then no longer exist. While we have discussed whether to consider other ERP systems here an there over the years we have always come back to the fact that our existing ERP system is well established and easy enough to maintain, and is cost effective
Read full review We selected Avalara because our prior service did not have the range of tax codes required for our products. They had nothing related to medical devices or supplies, so we used a generic 'taxable' tax code. Customers were unhappy because some states exempted the product we sold, even if the customer was not tax-exempt. It caused many issues, including credit memos to refund sales tax charges.
Read full review Scalability There is no change that has to happen as your company grows, Avalara continues to do it's job for any size company
Read full review Return on Investment Runs well without a ton of support One server license required for site, can run several businesses Concurrent licensing keeps costs down for global business Read full review We have been able to keep staffing the same even though business has more than doubled. Avalara filing my returns has cut down on my time spent by hours. I hopeful our new integrations will soon help the rest of the sales staff as well. Read full review ScreenShots