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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Sage Intacct
Score 8.6 out of 10
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Sage Intacct is a cloud ERP system targeted at high-growth small and medium-sized businesses. Intacct includes applications for core financials and accounting, purchasing, order management, and financial reporting and business intelligence. It also integrates with 3rd party software like Salesforce.
Before choosing Avalara we used tax tables in Intacct, which required us to always know when rates were changing and add new rate tables when we were in new jurisdictions. We also had to manually calculate and file all returns. This was ok for a short time frame when our …
Since I am using Intacct, which is integrated with Avalara, the invoicing records which flows from Intacct to Avalara, it keeps a track of transactions which are committed, Uncommitted, Void and locked. It helps to validate much before to understand the reason behind and make …
Quickbooks is obviously simpler to use and has a lot more editing capability on the fly with reports and invoices. As it is such a widely used product, there are more answers available online. Sage has a more robust customization ability with report building and can …
In the past, I have used Zuora for SaaS accounting. Sage Intacct is undoubtedly superior in its reporting capabilities and overall functionality. Because of its broad capabilities, Sage Intacct does have a much higher learning curve than Zuora, but the ROI on that time spent …
Our organization transitioned from Blackbaud Financial Edge to Sage Intacct. We selected Sage Intacct due to the flexibility offered through dimensions, increased efficiency, cloud-based accessibility, real-time data, dashboards, quarterly releases, and many other reasons. …
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.
Sage Intacct is well suited for organizations that have outgrown a basic accounting system and need real integrations, better reporting, and the ability to centralize financial operations without significantly adding headcount. For us specifically, it was the right fit because we needed to connect multiple systems, bring invoicing in house, and give leadership real time visibility into our financials. It works particularly well for small but complex finance teams that need the system to absorb work rather than create it. The system is powerful but it requires someone who understands accounting well enough to configure and maintain it properly. It is also worth noting that some of the more advanced features, like bank feeds and certain automation capabilities, can be harder to fully utilize depending on your banking relationships and technical setup.
Custom, real-time financial reporting. I am able to streamline my reporting to pull in various account groups and calculations which save me time from having to do it in Excel.
Out of the box standard reports for clients who don't require as custom of reporting or even as a great starting point to build out reports.
Integrations with other platforms, such as Airbase, various banks, Rippling, etc.
The dashboard module is extremely helpful in my monthly review of various entities.
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.
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.
Sage Intacct is continuously evolving and increasing it's functionalities. I am excited to attend conferences to learn what is in the roadmap for future releases. Additionally, using Sage Intacct allows me grow as a professional, I am really enjoy the knowledge that I have within the product to be able to share my experiences.
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.
The ease of use as a seasoned user is wonderful; however, new users struggle to adapt to the program efficiently. Better training videos--all in one location--would be beneficial. The use of a "sandbox" environment is a great tool for new employees or for the fiscal department to test certain journal entries or other transactions to verify accuracy of data.
There has only been one occurrence where Sage Intacct was not available to me, however I had already been working a number of hours trying to get a project completed. It honestly allowed me to step back and take a much needed break.
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
As fas as integration is concerned I don't feel this slows Sage Intacct down at all. However, sometimes I do feel it takes some larger reports more time to load due to all the detail. As well as, I "move very fast" in my motions so sometimes I double click on fuctions too quickly and the system seems to think that I have a duplicate request.
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.
Only a few times have we had to reach out to support, and every time we did, we received a relatively quick response and a solution was found fairly quickly. Only once was there an issue that took longer than a week to resolve, but it still did eventually get solved.
I have taken in person training classes at several of the annual Sage Intacct user conferences. It is very interactive and the trainers are very easy to follow and understand. They are great at getting everyone in the class involved. They also make sure everyone has learned to task before moving to a new one.
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 free training is very minimal. For what we pay for the service, I would like more training. We end up training new users in-house because the provided free training is not nearly comprehensive enough. That being said, the training provided, for the material covered, was adequate and relevant for the given topics.
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.
I would not use a thrid party administrator to implement your system, especially if you are going to be modifying the system at all. Use Intacct implementors as they will be able to better support you on any issues that come up after you go live.
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.
Sage Intacct was selected as the best fit for our core financial management needs, reporting requirements, and finance team operating model. Sage Intacct’s dimensional model was a major factor. It allowed us to report by department, entity, business unit, customer, vendor, project, or other dimensions without creating an overly complex chart of accounts. The approval workflows, transaction history, supporting documentation, and reporting structure helped strengthen financial controls.
Positive - It runs better than our old software when we all work together, rather than having to sign off on each other and deal with syncing issues.
Negative - It's not as easy to go back to fix an amount, a date, etc. Sometimes, a very small mistake needs to be corrected by voiding and redoing the entire transaction.
We can successfully sync other software we use with Intacct! It reduces workload when things are automated.
