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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Intuit Lacerte
Score 9.3 out of 10
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Intuit Lacerte is an Income Tax Compliance system, providing forms, tax planning support, as well as document management and document storage.
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.
This software is great for a tax preparer that wants the whole package from organizers to customer returns with letters and invoices. This is the best software with everything combined together. For new tax preparers looking for expensive software and are willing to some items (invoices) organizers, scheduling) through other means, Intuit Lacerte might be too expensive. But once the practice grows the time saved having all the “bells and whistles “ is worth every penny!
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.
Although Intuit Lacerte offers the option for clients to by by refund, it is limited to 2 banks which means we could have to change banks to offer this service, broadening the banks relationship would assist us greatly.
Although Intuit Lacerte is set up for running reports, they are not as dynamic as they could be, for example, running a report for all clients working for a specific employer, or occupation if we were targeting an audience.
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.
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.
Intuit Lacerte is not only easy for those veteran users such as myself, but is it also easy to teach to the new users, which makes it a good fit for a firm such as ours that has a high volume of interns and trainees in the industry. Many of which can then take that experience with them to the next firm they move on to, which exhibits as perpetual value.
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
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.
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 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.
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.
I’ve heard other tax preparers talk about their software and their likes and dislikes. When I offer to show them Intuit Lacerte most are blown away by what it does. One preparer used ProConnrct online tax (also by Intuit), and she loves how easy Intuit Lacerteis to use. She said having live support (not chat) to actually be able to show issues and work through them was great. Both programs use the same calculations, but the extras (trial balance, organizers with prior year data, invoicing, scheduling, filters, etc) are what makes Intuit Lacerte the best!
Lacerte Diamond Passport fees is highly priced at 17.5K USD + fastpath additional per user. They could consider to bring down the cost so that it works out lucratively.
