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.
N/A
CCH® SureTax®
Score 7.5 out of 10
N/A
CCH SureTax is designed by tax experts to help businesses comply even with the most complex sale and use tax requirements. Always up-to-date on 100,000+ annual tax legislation changes, this cloud-based sales tax automation platform aims to ensure customers accurately calculate, collect, and remit taxes to the correct authorities every time.
Truthfully, it came down to the quoted cost/contracts/implementation costs, and that our point of sale system claimed it had done integrations with Avalara in the past and not with the other firms we were considering. I was not actually a part of the discussion and decision …
Avalara is doing a lot better in my eyes. Currently we're having to provide location (register agent) address and they do not calculate state we are not exempt in. If we want the service then we will have to add the states on our end and incur addition transaction charges.
Avalara was easily ahead of the competition. Their ease of integration and reporting put them ahead. CCH at the time had even fewer modules and integrations than Avalara did, which was a consideration as we try to be agile and did not know how long we would stay on our …
Avalara is vastly superior to the CCH product I used. CCH was manual, often made mistakes, and was not intuitive at all. Avalara is significantly better.
Avalara has the best API but doesn't handle volume well ONESOURCE is a custom solution, tailored to fit to each customer needs by team of integrators works great for large businesses Sov0s if you don't have anything nice to say say nothing at all
I recommended Avalara as an alternative, but our Corporate office had already paid some money for the SureTax product a few years before and then didn't move forward, and thought they could utilize that payment towards this project. As it turned out, they were not allowed to …
Avalara is a big name but fall short of expectation their software, got the attitude that they don't care and would not see through the implementation stage. They are not good for new comers.
We start from Avalara by uploading data in specific format to Avalara and then downloading the tax result from Avalara. This is without application integration. Later we have more products and we need everything to be taxed in time and automatically. We found SureTax and tried …
Verified User
Team Lead
Chose CCH® SureTax®
We decided on SureTax because of some prior relationships our CEO had. The technical implementation team had a much better impression of the advice and explanations and guidance we received from Avalara
We researched them and had a few conversations because other areas of our company are using software from Avalara and we hoped to bundle but we couldn't meet their data deadlines at all so we had to keep looking around. There's really not much more I can say about it as that …
We used Avalara from 2007 through 2012. We had continual connection issues with their system going down at least once a month. When your sales tax system goes down, everything within your ERP that uses sales tax also goes down. We are constantly entering quotes, orders, …
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 …
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.
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.
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.
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.
We have participated in some prepayment testing so we know that functionality is being built out and what we saw looked really good. We're anxious to have that rolled out.
We'd like a cleaner way to export documentation of what was paid and EXACTLY what was paid. Currently web fees and some small balances are not shown by the website and that means making journal entries is a more manual process than hoped.
We've been working with folks at SureTax about discrepancies between CCH RADAR rates vs the rates which get used in SureTax. We have learned the 2 systems do not utilize the same data and we often find RADAR is more accurate.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Previously we paid $5,200 per year for a standalone telecom tax calculation program. The overall cost of the combined solution that we have is just about the same as the cost of everything that we have before adding that cost in.
Once you add in the additional benefit of the API integration and the automation that's freed up employee time, I think it's fairly safe to say that as we've grown, the combined efficiencies have allowed us to operate with two fewer employees than we would have otherwise needed.
Over past 4 years we have yet to be notified of any errors in our submitted regulatory taxes.
