Avalara vs. TaxJar

I feel Avalara is the best at helping with sales tax needs. I also know they are opening up more areas to help with business needs. Our only drawback is that since we are a retailer that follows a 4-4-5 monthly calendar, it isn't an option to have Avalara process and submit our taxes monthly.

Incentivized

If you aren't a tax professional, this is a must. Trying to manually calculate which county/city/state sales tax is owed will break your brain. Actually, even if you were a tax professional, why would you want to manually do it when you could just have a tool like this to calculate it for you. I wish it was also affordable to have it file for you and there are some crunchy bits, but its pros definitely outweigh the cons.

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

• The CSV upload for clients that do not have or want to connect directly is very good. It allows us to get a lot of the information done quickly.
• The cost is very competitive.
• According to our clients, the integration is relatively easy.
• For the most part, the reports are accurate.

Incentivized

• I find it virtually impossible to access people when you have issues with anything
• In my experience, everything runs through account managers and they are non-responsive and unavailable most of the time.
• In my experience, 99% of all communication with anybody at Avalara has to be done via some ridiculous form or via email. Human contact is extremely difficult to resolve an issue that sometimes requires human to human contact.

• Continually increase its native integration features with BigCommerce, which recently just opened up more Checkout APIs and Sales Tax APIs.
• The Amazon integration is confusing only because Amazon (sometimes?) calculates and collects sales tax on your behalf. It's not clear what's best-- to let Amazon do it for you or for TaxJar to handle it.
• Onboarding could be a bit easier and guided.

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.

Usability is simple and user-friendly. It is a very intuitive product. All their products are easy to use. It is one of the major benefits of their products. The ease and user-friendly interface of their products are a time saver in itself. Our associates are not having to retrain for common tasks to find what they need.

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

Avalara is not consistent in giving us information timely. For instance, right now, we have a help desk ticket with them that's been open since October. They are still trying to figure it out and we haven't gotten any feedback on where they are at or what is going on. That seems to me a very excessive amount of time to be working on a problem. Was it forgotten? Is there something bigger going on? Do they need something from us? An update would be helpful.

Also, many times when we call with an issue or concern (wrong tax rate for instance) we generally feel like the help desk assumes it's of our doing instead of theirs and doesn't truely listen when we explain the problem because we end up repeating it over and over as well as sending examples. We expect more respect on our end.

Incentivized

We had a few questions about integrations & onboarding, and support answered quickly and in-depth. They understood our questions - which were a bit technical in nature - and were able to provide an explanation in a timely and specific manner that allowed us to get the system up and running quickly.

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

TaxJar is less expensive, simpler to integrate and their billing is straightforward so that you don't have to worry about huge surprises at the end of a month or quarter. They spend a lot less time on sales/marketing but their support is excellent and overall we have had a much better experience with TaxJar.

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

• We have been able to keep staffing the same even though business has more than doubled.
• Avalara filing my returns has cut down on my time spent by hours.
• I hopeful our new integrations will soon help the rest of the sales staff as well.

Incentivized

• With regards to ROI, it definitely saves time. And time, as they say, is money. It may be hard to put a particular dollar sign on this, but it definitely has provided a positive return.
• It keeps me aware of where I have sales tax nexus that I might not know about otherwise. This is important. Even if I have to check it manually, at least I am made aware of where I need to file.
• It allows me to track how much in sales tax we've paid year over year, which is a good indication of how our sales are doing.

Incentivized