Avalara vs. Sage Intacct

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.

It depends on the scale and nature of the organisation, but for a business like ours, i.e. a medium sized business with several entities operating in more than one location with different currencies, I think it is a very good fit. It is relatively easy to get to grips with and provides a good level of functionality.

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• Establishes the connection with the appropriate municipal entity,
• Provides ample time for review of the sales and use tax liability,
• Submits the returns in accordance with the requirements of the respective municipal entity.
• Maintains historical record of each remittance.
• Allows for easy retrieval of past returns.

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• Excellent roll-up reporting of various categories of expenses across multiple depts. Data is not siloed when we want to find all revenue sources across business entities, for example, or even down to details such as what is spent on "discretionary" expense elements.
• Coding nomenclature is flexible and makes sense across business areas. Again, this allows for both more effective capture of data and with reporting slices and iterations.
• Sage Intacct's open architecture (availability of APIs and already existing hooks) has made integration with other system tool-sets easier than we would ever have thought.

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• 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.

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• The budgeting module is archaic. It needs to have more application features, including tracking changes made throughout the year.
• The creation of reports is complicated and lacks sufficient filtering options during the process.
• The Purchasing module should be more flexible, allowing users to add change orders to an existing PO rather than creating a new one.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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I have been using Avalara for years and do not remember ever having an outage during working hours. The service is accurate and dependable.

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.

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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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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I wasn't here when they first started with Avalara.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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We evaluated Sage Intacct alongside many other options, but Blackbaud and NetSuite were the frontrunners. They all were cloud-based and capable systems, but for our team, Sage Intacct was the clearer choice for a few reasons.
First, usability. Our team has varying levels of accounting experience, and Sage felt more intuitive across those different levels. The others could be powerful, but it also felt like it required more technical depth to navigate day-to-day, which was a concern for a small team. Second, functionality out of the box. Sage Intacct had more of what we needed built in without requiring a significant number of add-ons, which kept the solution simpler and the pricing more predictable.
Third, nonprofit fit. Sage Intacct is purpose-built for organizations like ours, and that showed in the functionality available and the system's overall design. And finally, our implementation partner, RSM, was well-versed in Sage Intacct and gave us confidence that we would have the right support behind us. That partnership was part of the overall value of choosing Sage.

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It is usable across all departments

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You can do a lot with this system and integrate it with a lot of your additional systems you use daily.

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• With Avalara, manual tax reporting and calculations have been reduced drastically, reducing manual effort and increasing efficiency.
• Since it is integrated with Sage Intacct, reporting in both Sage Intacct and Avalara is well balanced, and reporting with tax authorities has been handled well.

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• 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.

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