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
CCH Axcess
Score 5.3 out of 10
N/A
Wolters Kluwer offers CCH Axcess, a modular cloud-based tax preparation, compliance, and workflow management solution.
Multi state sales tax returns. I think the software is pretty good although it’s not intuitive. I found it takes some time to get used to using and you’re pretty much on your own. In my experience, they will not give professional advice. However, sometimes I think there is such a fine line that it is indistinguishable and, in my experience, they lead you right up to that line and then just stop.
If you have a pro that uses the software then you should be fine. If you are using the software and need any support from THEIR customer support people or dedicated rep, be prepared to be frustrated! Horrible Customer Service but it is due to Wolters Kluwer not caring and purchasing various tax products but not having the ethics to make sure they are properly trained or overwhelmed
I feel customer service in all areas needs drastic improvement - customer support, implementation, account management, etc.
Support for implementation; have the implementation team understand the business you are in and what products/ services you have purchased. Improve upon the sequence of implementation to make logical sense.
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.
My usability rating 5 years ago would have been much lower. I jumped in to the sales tax world with little experience outside the state where my employer is located. I think a structured training program from the outset would have helped. I know tutorials were available, but where to find them, which ones to begin with, etc. made usability very frustrating. I was learning the system but also using the system at the same time to bring my employer into compliance with the new nexus requirements
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
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.
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.
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.
