Avalara vs. Sovos Intelligent Compliance Cloud

Avalara is well suited any retailer that has sales in multiple states. It aides in accurately calculating sales taxes at all jurisdiction levels, taking into account exemptions, lower tax rates for grocery items, and sales tax holidays. Avalara keeps track of all sales generated in a specific period and then files sales tax returns in the necessary states. It may not be well suited for manufacturers/wholesalers that only produce goods for resale or retailers that do not sell goods and services in more than one location

Incentivized

In our case, sales and use tax are a must-have. With the recent change and continuous change in tax law, companies find it harder to comply with tax without a system. In our case, managing thousands of customers with thousands of tax codes - city tax, state tax, zone tax - proves to be a challenge. We need a system to minimize any exposure with federal and state tax law, and certainly protect us from an audit.

Incentivized

• Sales tax rates at a "roof top" level
• Has extensive research and documentation on telecommunications industry
• Research is always up to date
• The ability to ask questions and get clarification on specific situations with no limit as to how you ask a question and often get the answer the same day

Incentivized

• They are good at updating the tax tables with all the new sales tax law changes
• They are good at charging the correct sales tax amount as long as the software is set up or configured correctly
• They are good at following up at sales tax correspondences

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• The admin portal needs work - I cannot simply add and remove users, and have to create a case support. I think this is a low-hanging fruit Sovos is working on to resolve.
• The UI could be improved.
• The sync does not always happen instantly and sometime can take up to 24 hours.

Incentivized

We need their help with filing and keeping track of things. It is very likely we are in the process of renewing right now. Autumn is our case manager and she has been a great help in keeping us updated on our usage and renewal. I feel we will be using this for a very long time.

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.

Incentivized

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

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

Incentivized

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.

For the most part, the support team is responsive. However, with the recent switch from a legacy server to S1 server, Sovos created a problem for us. We simply can't upload a tax certificate. I logged a case with support, and they could not help, so they escalate to their senior technician. All in all, it has been more than 7 days, and they could not resolve a "simple" issue.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

The implementation team from Avalara was very knowledgable and did a good job of passing along information so that we could maintain the system and be able to make future changes ourselves. We had asked for some custom tax setup and they worked with us to get additional taxes set up that they didn't previously have. They worked with us to pull our documentation on tax rules and make sure those were included. I had hoped more scenarios would be there out of the box to cut down on the configuration time.

Incentivized

We selected Avalara because our prior service did not have the range of tax codes required for our products. They had nothing related to medical devices or supplies, so we used a generic 'taxable' tax code. Customers were unhappy because some states exempted the product we sold, even if the customer was not tax-exempt. It caused many issues, including credit memos to refund sales tax charges.

Incentivized

I have used sales tax tables in the past and they are a lot more accurate as long as the configuration is done correctly up front. I have also used Avalara. Avalara has a more consumer friendly interface and better reporting function

Incentivized

There is no change that has to happen as your company grows, Avalara continues to do it's job for any size company

Incentivized

• With Wayfair, our tax obligation increased 300% and still growing. Avalara was an extremely valuable resource in helping us manage those requirements.
• Avalara has allowed us to maintain staff levels without increasing our overhead for any new associates to focus on those tax issues.

Incentivized

• It saved us a lot of time and money but eliminating the manpower needed to process manually ourselves
• It helped reduce the time needed to follow up and resolve sales tax correspondences
• It helped reduce costs and time to register in new taxing jurisdications

Incentivized