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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Proconnect Tax Online
Score 9.1 out of 10
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Intuit ProConnect Tax Online is cloud-based professional tax software. It integrates with QuickBooks and includes a client portal so that clients can input their tax data online. ProConnect has a pay-per-return pricing structure.
I find Avalara to work very well if you are using a software system that is integrated with Avalara, and it is set up to calculate the tax and file the returns. It is very streamlined and efficient. It doesn't work as well if the tax is calculated elsewhere and you have Avalara filing your returns; the options for getting the tax info into Avalara are very limited.
Intuit has coined the term "Firm of the Future" and its products live up to that moniker. If you run a practice that is cloud based, paperless and makes use of cutting edge tools such as e-signatures, client portals, etc., then this product will be a good fit for you. If you are slow to change and want to use the traditional desktop computing environment and frequently print client draft returns for review, use wet signatures, etc. then this might not be the product for you. If you are already using some of Intuit's products and plan to implement more business clients into QuickBooks Online, I would say this product is a "must have".
Avalara needs to be able to provide tax and legal advice, so we don't have to go to an outside source.
Some states we file in have more than just sales tax on the return. For example, Washington has B&O tax, tire tax, sales and use tax. It would help a lot if Avalara could report all of these taxes, so we don't have to file manually.
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.
The overall usability has been good, but we just have some problems/issues with the integration, especially with NetSuite. I believe that this should be a simple fix but having difficulty with getting our problems/issues addressed. I do like the Avalara homepage and it being easy to navigate to different pages when needed.
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
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.
The support is, excellent and Intuit overall provides good support. Their customer service representatives are friendly and always assist with issues when needed. There are multiple ways to contact the support team. I have not sued them though very much for technical tax issues and primarily the customer service team when needed.
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 think ProConnect Tax Online is better than competitors. As I am new to my career, the only software I have used are ProConnect Tax Online, and Thomson Reuters Ultra Tax. I prefer cloud-based software, but I think Ultra Tax is easier software to learn on. It is easier to learn on because it is form based
Just being the administrative assistant I can't really talk on ROI - that would be for my boss to address. But since our office strives to be completely paperless efiling fits in with our paperless narrative.
