Avalara vs QuickBooks Desktop for Mac

• Avatax stays current with all the changes in rates and does an excellent job of calculating the correct sales tax to charge.
• The reporting interface for sales tax reports is easy to use and once you set up a report you can save it as a favorite and rerun it any time with one click. Their UI on the reporting is simple and provides a minimum number of clicks to get the data you want and export it to Excel where every number lives whether it belongs there or not!

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• The program is very easy to learn, the interface is incredibly user-friendly and there are tons of free resources and tutorials available
• It makes managing payroll really easy for the employee and accountant on staff. No more lost time sheets or late paychecks!
• Managing bills and paying them has become streamlined and it's great having everything in one place so we don't lose track of things.

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• In the beginning our programmer wished to speak directly with a programmer at Avalara so he could have some specific questions answered. Instead he was referred to a forum where he had to post his questions. This delayed our implementation of Avatax.
• I'm not sure if there is help available to assist in learning how to reconcile sales tax returns or not. We basically had to figure out how to do that ourselves.

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• The #1 complaint is that setting it up right is a challenge. People waste time trying to figure it out only to realize that they don't know accounting so of course they don't know how an accounting program should be set up. Like any time you are in over your head, reach out to your network and find someone who can log onto your computer and walk you through it.
• If you need to track the cost of wages to jobs you can't do it with the online payroll, but check for yourself because it's a function that landscaping companies and construction businesses usually need, so maybe they have added it by now. That would really help!
• It's premise-based software and that means you take on the role of hardware admin, and it's a lot of work for what is increasingly becoming a smaller gap in the functionality between QuickBooks for Mac and QuickBooks Online.
• QuickBooks for Mac 2015 has been updated consistently over the last 3 years and continues to provide for the bookkeeping needs of small companies using Macs in their offices. However, it has limited job costing functionality. It is similar in functionality to the 2010 version of QuickBooksPro which runs on Windows.

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• Prior to Avalara, we had two full-time people doing nothing but tax returns. Now, we only review data via reports within Avalara and it takes one person about 2 hours a month.
• Certificate exemption was a manual process we tracked on an excel spreadsheet. It was not always easy to read and wrought with human error. CertCapture has made this process digital and saved us countless amounts of time.
• With Avalara managing the taxation through our ERP, we rarely have to worry about the taxation not being correct on our invoices to our customers. This saves time in having to investigate tax rates by state, county, and jurisdiction.

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• The ROI was good for when we were a smaller company because it is a lot cheaper than other more sophisticated programs.
• The negative impact is that it caused a lot of extra manual entering and data entry that too often resulted in mistakes.

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