Avalara vs. botkeeper

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.

Well, Suited Scenarios are: Automating the data entry, analysis, bookkeeping, managing finances fairly on this basis, and pulling out burndown charts, reports, and other analytical chapters. hence it helps in understanding the business, cash flows, or issues related to that which surely end up with the ideas of revenue growth directly and indirectly as well. And the most important thing in all this is done by AI-powered tools so management of resources overhead is no more. Scenarios where it is less appropriate: When it comes to a strong comprehensive accounting then the bookkeeper fails there and we need to integrate with third-party service providers to achieve the goal. So this is the worst scenario. And for detailed resources, one needs a vast knowledge base, and that's not the case with the Botkeeper as its knowledge base appears to be limited to basic.

Incentivized

• Establishes the connection with the appropriate municipal entity,
• Provides ample time for review of the sales and use tax liability,
• Submits the returns in accordance with the requirements of the respective municipal entity.
• Maintains historical record of each remittance.
• Allows for easy retrieval of past returns.

Incentivized

• They have a clean and easy portal that I can log into and link all accounts so they have access to what they need
• They are so good at what they do that I only need to respond to 1 or 2 emails a month for uncategorized transactions or clarifications
• They process all of our AR, AP, year end reports, sales tax, and bookkeeping. And it's all very accurate and on time.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• their current interface
• the scoping tool (makes sense once you're using botkeeper)

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

I have been using Avalara for years and do not remember ever having an outage during working hours. The service is accurate and dependable.

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

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

I wasn't here when they first started with Avalara.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

Botkeeper is quite new to accounting solutions. The tech base is quite new and cutting edge. Service support is quite fast and good. Integration support is open to another third party to enhance in all possible ways. Eliminates overhead of hiring permanent resident accountants. Great user experience and well-optimized tools.

Incentivized

It is usable across all departments

Incentivized

• With Avalara, manual tax reporting and calculations have been reduced drastically, reducing manual effort and increasing efficiency.
• Since it is integrated with Sage Intacct, reporting in both Sage Intacct and Avalara is well balanced, and reporting with tax authorities has been handled well.

Incentivized