Avalara vs. ACA HQ by Equifax

I find Avalara well-suited in the majority of situations when it comes to tax calculation. The only issues we run into are with more complex tax situations. It may be less appropriate for invoices that have significant variability that affects taxability. For example, if there is a business that sometimes is an installer and other times is not, there may need to be different tax codes set up for each situation. This requires the users to know how tax needs to be charged in different situations, rather than having Avalara do this automatically.

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

• Reporting could be more flexible - I'd like to customise what columns I want to export.
• Adding bulk transactions is a bit cumbersome, and the user interface for required fields could do with some improvement.
• It would be good to have more options to pay for tax settlements.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

Avalara is hands down the best product available when it comes to what they offer, the robustness of their systems, and the diversity of their offerings. -All while being very cost-competitive. Avalara's tech is best in class while providing a total solution and integration between products and our systems, making processes much more convenient.

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.

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

TaxJar is integrated with Kaseya autotask, and this integration is very inefficient and was not easy to set up. Neither TaxJar nor Kaseya support was helpful at all, "rude" is the only word to describe that, whereas Avalara has always tried to be helpful and has been very friendly to work with. TaxJar has no similar capability to retain their tax-calculated transactions and file the returns; TaxJar would calculate the taxes in Kaseya autotask and you would still have to manually import the data into TaxJar if you wanted to subscribe and have them file your returns. Needless to say that was a non-starter.

Incentivized

It is usable across all departments

Incentivized

• We went from two staff members down to one staff member dedicated to monitoring and reconciling sales tax with the G/L.
• It takes the one staff member less time to monitor sales tax than having to go through and calculate and file in each state.
• Avalara gives us confidence that the returns are filed accurately and timely every month.

Incentivized