Likelihood to Recommend The best I can do is a two. Our experience has been so bad, the software is not good in lots of respects, and the customer service people are either too overwhelmed with people with issues that they can't respond or they just don't care to respond. And the services come at a premium price. So you would think we could at least get a response. I know Avalara has real tax expertise deep inside that company. But the tools and processes they have cobbled together to monetize that expertise are not delivering a good experience. And their customer support is literally the worst I have ever experienced--and particularly coming from a premium provider
Read full review CIC Plus was designed to set up local and state taxes for employees in the payroll system. Taxes were not being set up for work locations and there was a lot of manual entry as well as audits that had to be done to set up employees properly.
Read full review Pros Calculates the correct tax regardless of state, county, or local jurisdiction. CertCapture provides a site for managing all resale certificates, updating, renewing, and providing reports/backup in the event of an audit. One stop shop for all things tax makes my life easier! Read full review CIC Plus sets up state and local taxes for employees' home addresses. CIC Plus is easy to use. CIC Plus offers an I-9 service. Read full review Cons 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. Read full review CIC Plus needs to set up the local taxes for employees' home and work location. CIC Plus does not automatically set up taxes for a new hire unless the new hire goes to CIC Plus website and fills out the paperwork. CIC Plus needs to have an automatic feed for every new hire that automatically sets up ALL the home and work location taxes for the employee. Read full review Likelihood to Renew 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.
Read full review Usability The software and addons that we use are very applicable to our operations and the usability of the sotware works great with all of the software we have it integrated with. The certcapture and avatax work great together and has made things very automated for our company as majority of our sales are sales exempt. Navigating through the software is very user friendly and helps when we have to have other individuals go in as it is not difficult for them to find where they need to go within the software.
Read full review Reliability and Availability I have been using Avalara for years and do not remember ever having an outage during working hours. The service is accurate and dependable.
Read full review Performance 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
Read full review Support Rating 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.
Read full review CIC Plus does not set up all the taxes that are necessary to pay employees properly and this left the employer wide open for tax penalties and interest for taxes that were not paid properly and timely.
Read full review In-Person Training I wasn't here when they first started with Avalara.
Read full review Online Training 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.
Read full review Implementation Rating 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.
Read full review CIC Plus promised us a product that would set up taxes for employees home and work location and it did not do this as promised
Read full review Alternatives Considered 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.
Read full review BSI Tax Profile works to set up taxes for employees Home and Work location. It works as designed and requires a lot less auditing of employees' tax set up.
Read full review Scalability There is no change that has to happen as your company grows, Avalara continues to do it's job for any size company
Read full review Return on Investment We are positively impacted by Avalara in having a central library to store our certificate files. We spend very little time and resources to calculate and compile tax data for filing. The electronic filing has helped insure we are on time with our filings and avoiding penalties. Read full review I wasn't involved in the cost aspect. I was the administrator of the CIC Plus system. CIC Plus caused us to owe back taxes on local taxes that were not automatically set up for employees. The taxes that were not paid timely had interest and penalties associated with them. Read full review ScreenShots