Avalara

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Avalara
Score 8.1 out of 10
N/A
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.
$21
per month
Pricing
Avalara
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Avalara
Free Trial
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
Yes
Entry-level Setup FeeOptional
Additional Details—
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Avalara
Considered Both Products
Avalara
Chose Avalara
Avalara and Vertex are cloud-based solutions for sales tax compliance, but they differ in features, pricing, and customer reviews. Avalara and Vertex offer tax calculation, tax filing, exemption management, reporting, and audit trail features. However, Avalara claims to have …
Chose Avalara
Since I am using Intacct, which is integrated with Avalara, the invoicing records which flows from Intacct to Avalara, it keeps a track of transactions which are committed, Uncommitted, Void and locked. It helps to validate much before to understand the reason behind and make …
Chose Avalara
RSM already had a connector and CCH did not; we were also using RSM for SL2018 implementation.
Chose Avalara
It's easy to use and integrated with existing accounting applications.
Chose Avalara
We use Stripe but duplicate our transaction in QuickBooks so our Stripe orders are uncommitted orders in Avatax.
Chose Avalara
We briefly reviewed TaxJar, but went with Avalara when we did our evaluation. Avalara Provided everything that we needed.
Chose Avalara
I have not used anything in the past
Chose Avalara
I haven't used any other sales tax products except for calculating my returns by hand. Unfortunately we made the decision to implement Avalara almost 5 years ago and I really don't remember what other solutions we considered at the time.
Chose Avalara
We didn’t look at any other vendors.
Chose Avalara
Avalara was in place when I came on board, and the experience has been so positive that as we have encountered other needs, we have gone directly to Avalara.
Chose Avalara
I wasn't involved in the decision / implementation
Chose Avalara
We used Accurate Tax briefly to calculate our tax rates for Ecommerce, we had multiple issues with miscalculating.
Chose Avalara
We have not used other products, but would be open to exploring.
Chose Avalara
Easier to use, but since our compliance is outsourced, we went with the same software that our consultants are using.
Chose Avalara
Chargebee had an agreement with Avalara so we could not use our current provider for sales tax. Avalara is good for sales tax collection, and even easier to set up, but Vertex Returns was better because once it was set up there were fewer issues than we have had with Avalara, …
Chose Avalara
Avalara is significantly more user friendly than the Vertex product we previously had. It also makes the taxability determinations and our Vertex product did not do that without us manually setting up and/or changing the taxability.
Chose Avalara
I have only used Avalara so I do not have a valuable answer to this question
Chose Avalara
Avalara seems to be a better user experience from my interaction with these systems.
Chose Avalara
Avalara Managed Returns is the only product we have used or would have chosen to use, in conjunction with our current ERP application.
Chose Avalara
We have used SOVOS and they are archaic compared to Avalara. Their customer service was sales focused and unable to assist with reporting issues that their reports were populating as results for State figures. Would recommend a switch ASAP to anyone thinking about the two.
Top Pros
Top Cons
Features
Avalara
Type of tax
Comparison of Type of tax features of Product A and Product B
Avalara
8.4
301 Ratings
1% below category average
Sales and Use Taxes8.9294 Ratings
Cross-border Taxes8.364 Ratings
VAT / GST Taxes7.755 Ratings
Energy and Fuel Taxes8.525 Ratings
Tax Reporting & Compliance
Comparison of Tax Reporting & Compliance features of Product A and Product B
Avalara
8.2
279 Ratings
2% below category average
Geolocation for Tax Assessment8.7167 Ratings
3rd-Party Software Integrations8.0222 Ratings
Tax Data Reporting8.3247 Ratings
Compliance Administration Management8.3191 Ratings
Tax Exemption Processing8.3201 Ratings
Tax Document Management8.1192 Ratings
Complex Tax Scenario Management7.4127 Ratings
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User Ratings
Avalara
Likelihood to Recommend
8.0
(412 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
9.2
(26 ratings)
Usability
8.1
(404 ratings)
Availability
8.0
(8 ratings)
Performance
8.0
(8 ratings)
Support Rating
5.7
(18 ratings)
In-Person Training
8.0
(2 ratings)
Online Training
7.3
(3 ratings)
Implementation Rating
6.4
(197 ratings)
Configurability
5.0
(5 ratings)
Ease of integration
5.1
(11 ratings)
Product Scalability
8.0
(7 ratings)
Vendor post-sale
1.1
(8 ratings)
Vendor pre-sale
7.9
(8 ratings)
User Testimonials
Avalara
Likelihood to Recommend
Avalara
The best I can do is a two. Our experience has been so bad, the software is not good in lots of respects, and the customer service people are either too overwhelmed with people with issues that they can't respond or they just don't care to respond. And the services come at a premium price. So you would think we could at least get a response. I know Avalara has real tax expertise deep inside that company. But the tools and processes they have cobbled together to monetize that expertise are not delivering a good experience. And their customer support is literally the worst I have ever experienced--and particularly coming from a premium provider
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Pros
Avalara
  • Calculates the correct tax regardless of state, county, or local jurisdiction.
  • CertCapture provides a site for managing all resale certificates, updating, renewing, and providing reports/backup in the event of an audit.
  • One stop shop for all things tax makes my life easier!
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Cons
Avalara
  • 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.
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Likelihood to Renew
Avalara
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.
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Usability
Avalara
The software and addons that we use are very applicable to our operations and the usability of the sotware works great with all of the software we have it integrated with. The certcapture and avatax work great together and has made things very automated for our company as majority of our sales are sales exempt. Navigating through the software is very user friendly and helps when we have to have other individuals go in as it is not difficult for them to find where they need to go within the software.
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Reliability and Availability
Avalara
I have been using Avalara for years and do not remember ever having an outage during working hours. The service is accurate and dependable.
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Performance
Avalara
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
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Support Rating
Avalara
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.
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In-Person Training
Avalara
I wasn't here when they first started with Avalara.
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Online Training
Avalara
The videos go too fast; I kept having to pause them and go back. They don't allow for any practice transactions or provide training materials.
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Implementation Rating
Avalara
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.
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Alternatives Considered
Avalara
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.
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Scalability
Avalara
There is no change that has to happen as your company grows, Avalara continues to do it's job for any size company
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Return on Investment
Avalara
  • We are positively impacted by Avalara in having a central library to store our certificate files.
  • We spend very little time and resources to calculate and compile tax data for filing.
  • The electronic filing has helped insure we are on time with our filings and avoiding penalties.
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ScreenShots

Avalara Screenshots

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