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.
N/A
Thomson Reuters ONESOURCE
Score 6.3 out of 10
N/A
Thomson Reuters ONESOURCE is a portfolio of tax and accounting technology for corporations designed to help users boost collaboration with departments and partners and ensure seamless tax compliance no matter where a company does business.
On this in regards to Avalara, I would need to wait to see a bit as both instances the ERP was SAP, and we are in the process of implementing SAP to Avalara. So I cannot compare those at this time. I [can't] compare my use of ONESOURCE/SAP to Avalara/NetSuite +Salesforce, as I …
Avalara has provided additional content for product taxability and tax rates. Additionally the ease of use or user friendliness of the platform for our tax team to utilize the full capabilities of Avalara has proven to be best in class. Other platforms may require additional …
Limited with home rule jurisdictions and taxability categories, it's not a very robust product, but will meet most of the needs of e-commerce end users or a business needing tax calculating on an invoice without having to run the iterations manually.
Most of what has been done in the past was paper held in hand. This created many difficulties when trying to look up past documents, and checking the validity of past documents. With CertCapture, everything is at our fingertips.
Avalara had more integrations, was the only system at the time that worked with Shopify+, which we are re-platforming our Magento site to, and came in at a price point competitive with Vertex.
Honestly - we liked Sovos and ONESOURCE a lot better. ONESOURCE had the tightest and …
Verified User
Manager
Chose Avalara
Truthfully, it came down to the quoted cost/contracts/implementation costs, and that our point of sale system claimed it had done integrations with Avalara in the past and not with the other firms we were considering. I was not actually a part of the discussion and decision …
Avalara as a one stop shop for tax compliance blows away the competition. The level of expertise received for the price is a tremendous value. The user interface is easy to navigate, all of the transactions and returns are conveniently saved in the system for easy recall, and …
OneSource is behind Avalara in many ways. However, at our time of implementation Avalara could not handle some of the calculations we required. That has changed since.
ONESOURCE blows Sovos out of the water. would take ONESOURCE 10 out of 10 times. The two biggest differentiators are the friendliness and helpfulness of customer support and the overall capabilities of the software.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
To reiterate - a very useful tool for private company information, otherwise not forthcoming on the public domain. It is very crucial in Company analyses for various lenses, slices and dices of Company information. Also useful in industry analysis and in list building. Overall a great research and analytics tool.
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
It does not [matter] how much you pay in support packages for Avalara, [from my experience] you will never receive timely response times. Additionally, [it seems to me] their support techs are not experienced and/or do not understand the nature of your issues. I have resolved the majority of my issues before the support team is able to.
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.
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.
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!
