Avalara vs. Thomson Reuters ONESOURCE

We use Avatax and Avalara Managed Returns in conjunction with SAGE 50. The combination of Avatax and Avalara Managed Returns has provided a consistent and accurate vehicle for assessing and remitting sales and use taxes. For organizations doing business in multiple states across hundreds of tax regions, these products serve as an invaluable resource. The reporting capabilities allow us to work closely with our senior management and accounting teams so as to ensure we are meeting our compliance obligations.

We use [Thomson Reuters ONESOURCE] to prepare federal and state income tax returns which allows us to complete the work assigned very quickly and allow senior members of the team to review the work before submitting in a very fluid state. While not in the tax or busy season, the program is not as used as much.

• Calculating taxes down to the local levels
• Remitting tax returns in a timely manner
• Responding to tax questions in a timely manner
• Reporting issues with their platform and updating as they make corrections to ensure uninterrupted use of their product.
• Ensuring tax rates are updated and locales change them

• ONESOURCE is excellent for providing a holistic suite of products that are specifically geared toward tax compliance.
• ONESOURCE also does an excellent job of maintaining a fresh look and appearance to their products, but doesn't change the base functionality just to sell more or improve the look of the product.
• ONESOURCE also does an excellent job of maintaining current tax information. In an ever changing tax world, this is the most important thing for a piece of tax software to provide.

• If a list of tax-exempt codes is available, I have not found it and the help desk has not shared it. That code is necessary for Avalara and the online shopping cart to communicate that a customer is tax-exempt.
• When I first started using Avalara I could upload documents. Now I need a higher subscription level (as in, pay more money) to do the exact same task I was already doing for years.
• The one or two issues that I had that were not resolved right away were never really resolved. Luckily, we were able to eventually figure it out, but there were one or two cases (out of many, so still a low number) that were closed without a resolution.

• ONESOURCE absolutely needs to restore their TIN Matching feature. Not having a TIN Matching feature is huge and needs to be addressed immediately.
• The software interface itself is outdated and clunky. It is way behind in terms of user-friendliness and convenience. Additionally, it is only compatible with Internet Explorer. ONESOURCE is literally the only reason I would ever access Internet Explorer which is notably slower and more prone to freezing than Google Chrome or Safari. A good portion of our business uses Macs which means they are SOL on accessing ONESOURCE.
• The ability to look at multiple tax years for a single recipient would be huge. Currently, if a recipient asks us to pull three years of data, this means three different searches within each year's ONESOURCE instance. It's tedious and could be improved.

I have not been able to find a company that does it better than Avalara. I still have lots of problems, but we are working through them. Based on other demos i have seen and talking with peers in other companies, this is the best.

Avalara has a very user-friendly interface. I find navigating Avalara very intuitive and easy to access help whenever an issue arises. I have had to train a few employees working at remote locations and with minimal experience on Avalara processes and found that to be a relatively easy task.

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

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.

The ONESOURCE support has improved significantly over the years. Support sends out emails with the answer provided which helps in the future when the same issue occurs. This reduces the amount of calls to ONESOURCE Support as you can better document the calls and rely on previous answers if the same issue occurs. ONESOURCE support has also implemented a callback feature that reduces the amount of time spent on hold.

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

The videos go too fast; I kept having to pause them and go back. They don't allow for any practice transactions or provide training materials.

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.

We looked at Sovos pretty hard but came to the conclusion that they are geared for larger companies and were very expensive. When we contacted Avalara, their software and price structure seems to be in line with what we were looking for so we went with them, a decision I do not regret.

As I said it is an easy-to-use platform and saved us time and money. They have great customer service and have helped our company get new hires checked and in-service faster than our old company. By combining the two services in one place it has made it easier for the new hire and the HR staff to track results. I am a fan!

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

• Helped us be compliant as we expand into more states.
• Allows us to review/verify tax calculations monthly & be confident they are correct.
• Had a better integration with Rootstock as opposed to Infor, which we now use as our ERP. Wish that the integration with Infor was the same.

• Leaves sales tax off invoices from time to time.
• Reduces the amount of manual work needed to calculate sales tax and to update tax rates.