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.
$21
per month
ONESOURCE
Score 7.5 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 …
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.
Verified User
Employee
Chose Avalara
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.
Verified User
C-Level Executive
Chose Avalara
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 …
I think all have their own good points. I think Avalara should partner with a rate provider.
Verified User
Project Manager
Chose Avalara
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 …
Better pricing and great customer service and support.
ONESOURCE
Verified User
Employee
Chose Thomson Reuters ONESOURCE
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.
Verified User
Project Manager
Chose Thomson Reuters ONESOURCE
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!