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.
$21
per month
Certinia ERP Cloud
Score 7.8 out of 10
N/A
Certinia ERP Cloud automates financial management on the Salesforce platform. The customer-centric ERP software includes a general ledger, automated billing processes, and financial intelligence.
NetSuite is much better in that it can produce financial statements, has a subscription module, and is just as customizable as FinancialForce. If you have a midsized company, NetSuite may be better suited for your business needs. FinancialForce requires a lot of in-house …
I feel Avalara is the best at helping with sales tax needs. I also know they are opening up more areas to help with business needs. Our only drawback is that since we are a retailer that follows a 4-4-5 monthly calendar, it isn't an option to have Avalara process and submit our taxes monthly.
For accounting systems, users and/or evaluators often want to see some type of matrix or "heads up" comparisons of specific features and functionality of a system in key areas such as: 1) General Ledger 2) Order to Cash cycle 3) Purchase to Pay cycle 4) Cash management 5) Inventory and/or Cost Accounting (Projects/Jobs, etc) 6) Revenue Recognition 7) Fixed Assets management 8) Budgets 9) Tax 10) Reports and Analysis It would be great if this kind of matrix existed to be filled in by reviewers so that others could benefit from their perspectives about the applications and how they address or handle the specific features/functionality. With respect to FinancialForce, the company has found that nearly all the key features it needed were available from the application.
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
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.
Since SalesForce was not made with accounting in mind, building FinancialForce as a module on top of SalesForce gives problems because the overarching architect of SalesForce cannot facilitate all the accounting requirements.
The FinancialForce integration team was not very good, and did not help us set up our FinancialForce very well. Their customer support is also lacking and takes a long time to respond and troubleshoot our problems.
FinancialForce doesn't actually build financial statement reports. We were only able to run a trial balance, and we had to build the statements ourselves in Excel.
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.
The company has now converted its legacy, "home grown" operations system and built it on the force.com platform, and the integration between it and FinancialForce is deeply entrenched. No other application would be able to replicate this functionality, and the company will be able to scale and leverage the force.com platform as it grows.
Usability is simple and user-friendly. It is a very intuitive product. All their products are easy to use. It is one of the major benefits of their products. The ease and user-friendly interface of their products are a time saver in itself. Our associates are not having to retrain for common tasks to find what they need.
Change management is always an issue, but the evidence of the application's usability is that both long-time employees (used to the legacy systems for many years) and newer employees have been able to learn the system and improve their business processes.
Unless the internet is completely unavailable - which has not happened yet - the application is always accessible. Since FinancialForce is built on the force.com platform, it's uptime is tied to Salesforce security and system performance standards
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.
The response time for FinancialForce is exemplary. Immediate acknowledgement of the support request by automatically logging a case/ticket on the provider side, then less than 24-hour follow up by a support team member with specific questions, information or resolution for the issue.
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.
Through its Xtra login website available to its customers, FinancialForce offers a complete set of online, video tutorials, training and documentation. Each tutorial is "bite-sized", meaning it imparts instructional, step-by-step information in 2-3 minute narrated videos. For a particular cycle or process, like invoices to payments for example, each tutorial builds on the last so that the user can get a complete picture of the steps and process in less than 10 minutes.
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.
The company decided to run parallel for three months in order to soften the impact of the change from the legacy "system" - which users had been interfacing with for over a decade - to FinancialForce. While not recommended, this did provide time for the in-house "super user" team of 2 people to become completely familiar with the application, and thus provide hands-on training and be a resource for the users who would be processing the daily accounting transactions.
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.
FinancialForce Subscription & Usage Billing has more features, more useability, and manages higher numbers of customers. The systems I have used in the past are easier to navigate but couldn't handle this number of customers.
