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.
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CCH® SureTax®
Score 7.7 out of 10
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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 …
Avalara had steep price increases when we used 10+ years ago, which drove us to move to a legacy product, Exactor, all integrated with QuickBooks. We evaluated Sovos and SureTax when implementing NetSuite and found SureTax to be the most cost effective.
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 …
It is easy to integrate on top of existing operations and has a comprehensive platform to build off of. We have recently tried to layer on their ECM Pro product, but once we signed the contract, we have not heard from our salesperson or implementation team in 3 weeks, even after reaching out multiple times. We've struggled with every salesperson assigned to us, and it seems they are highly understaffed when supporting customers.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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)