Avalara vs. CCH® SureTax®

Avalara is well suited for us because it makes it easier for us to navigate sales tax and filing state sales tax returns for multiple states. I appreciate how simple they made this process for us, helps save us a great amount of time and allows us to focus on the business. Less appropriate, is that most of our customers are sales exempt and it can be a bit challenging at times with AvaTax overriding our tax calculation within NetSuite. Overall, that issue has been less and less, so we are moving in the right direction.

Incentivized

I would put CCH® SureTax® at the top of the scale for any Telecom business or anyone with a known tax scenario that will be similarly sketchy. This software, while not always user friendly, can do amazing things to help you navigate the tax issues facing us all today. This would not be appropriate for a company just needing help gathering their sales tax information. There are plenty of other, friendlier solutions, possibly what they are already using for their accounting that will do it cleaner, easier and cheaper. You just have to ask an expert in that software.

Incentivized

• 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

Incentivized

• Maintains Nexus nationwide.
• Implements all of the various sales tax rates nationwide automatically.
• Clean website that is very user friendly.
• Support is very quick to respond and always fixes any issues you may be having.
• We have had this since 2013, and not one time has a sales tax rate been wrong. We used to have Avalara, where we had 12 different overrides in their system just to calculate the correct tax. It is nice not having to maintain those.

Incentivized

• Avalara needs to be able to provide tax and legal advice, so we don't have to go to an outside source.
• Some states we file in have more than just sales tax on the return. For example, Washington has B&O tax, tire tax, sales and use tax. It would help a lot if Avalara could report all of these taxes, so we don't have to file manually.

Incentivized

• NetSuite integration is clunky, does not feed into native fields as renders some features useless
• Pricing increase after 3 year contract was astronomical, were able to negotiate however.
• Implementation should have been better tested by all parties, resulted in amending multiple returns. However, we did have a very tight timeline to integrate.

Incentivized

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.

We switched our tax service from Avalara to SureTax years ago. Prior to this, we manually prepared the data and ran a report uploading and then got the tax result every time. With Suretax providing enough and flexable APIs, we redesigned and implemented our new application to communicate with SureTax seamlessly and automatically. This greatly reduced our workload, improves the system efficiency, and increased the data accuracy.

I only say this because we had no real training on the system at all. We requested it multiple times, and no one could give us that. We had to figure a lot out for ourselves, got a rep change and finally got someone to help us navigate a bit better. Please make sure any onboarding clients get proper training and resources before going live.

Incentivized

SureTax is very reliable in with the integration with Microsoft Dynamics GP. It provides accurate tax calculations in accordance with tax updates. SureTax also has a user-friendly interface that makes it easy to navigate. It is easy to add customers and also run reports on the website. The overall manageability of it is great!

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

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.

It has taken much longer than we would like to get certain issues - and problems - resolved. And the initial product support as we designed the implementation left much to be desired

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

100% better. Avalara is a self-starter kit where businesses are forced to create and develop their own bundles and product types. The support that you get from the AvaTax is not as user-friendly. SureTax is full of seasoned experts and full of industry leaders. Law firms that I have worked with in the past, as well as other CPAs, only recommend SureTax.

Incentivized

There is no change that has to happen as your company grows, Avalara continues to do it's job for any size company

Incentivized

• With Wayfair, our tax obligation increased 300% and still growing. Avalara was an extremely valuable resource in helping us manage those requirements.
• Avalara has allowed us to maintain staff levels without increasing our overhead for any new associates to focus on those tax issues.

Incentivized

• positive impact on resources due to accessibility by more team members
• positive impact on resources due to willingness of other team members to use this GUI - it's more inviting
• positive impact on timing due to strict deadlines so I simply CANNOT be pulled off to help with other projects which often happened when deadlines were later in the month
• once the prepayment module is put into production that is also going to help with tracking (for states like FL, GA etc. where the number only changes once/year because we're told SureTax will "remember" that month to month and keep it filled in on each return)

Incentivized