Avalara vs. Thomson Reuters ONESOURCE vs. Vertex

In my opinion, the worst customer service and fraudulent withdrawal from our bank account. We've used Avalara for 3 years. When our renewal came up, we were considering other options. They sent an email stating we had to request a new contract, I sent the request and followed up. There was no response from Avalara so our contract price was unknown. I waited to hear from them and ended up canceling within their window, via the appropriate channels. I followed up multiple times, requesting cancellation confirmation and removal of our bank info (you can't self serve, although you can self serve add it). In my experience, they ignored me for 2 months until I posted publicly about their poor service. I changed our login information and migrated to another platform. In my experience, they withdrew funds from our bank account, the new provider said our taxes weren't paid and the funds are nowhere to be found. Avalara should have never withdrew the funds or billed me after I canceled. Beware of this company, in my opinion, they are non-responsive and unpleasant to deal with.

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.

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I have used Vertex since the very beginning of my career. I have always found the information clear, and easy to use. The documentation to use the product was thorough. We file returns in all 45 states that have sales / use taxes and having the ability to import data, key additional data in and print out a signature ready return has made life easy. I've never wanted to look at any other return preparation software as none of them come close to the product that Vertex created.

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• Establishes the connection with the appropriate municipal entity,
• Provides ample time for review of the sales and use tax liability,
• Submits the returns in accordance with the requirements of the respective municipal entity.
• Maintains historical record of each remittance.
• Allows for easy retrieval of past returns.

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• 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.

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• Vertex does a great job of building in-house industry expertise (leasing in our case) so they truly understand the tax technical and compliance obstacles we face day to day.
• Vertex actively solicits for and responds to customer feedback on development and product roadmap suggestions. The Leasing users group is an example where Vertex takes an active role in communicating with and taking feedback from our industry.
• Vertex tax updates are very timely and thorough, which makes the compliance process less stressful for our team.

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• Avalara's State Registrations option is pretty expensive and should be quicker and cheaper
• Avalara's State Filing Setup is not coordinated with their State Registrations, so you still have to set up manually what they just registered for you.
• Even if Avalara has all of your data, they won't set up a state filing if you miss a deadline of the 20th of the current month they won't file that month, even though they have all of the transactions. (This could happen when a new state is selected for tax calculation but the state registration hasn't been completed yet.) They should allow you to set up the returns by the first of the month it is filed in at the least.
• Avalara's extractor is very base and limited; it can't extract multiple lines into Avalara, it takes an entire invoice and inputs it as one line. We were told after frequent calls that it works that way by design. Those out there who file returns on a regular basis can identify the problem with this scenario and why this won't work for tax filing.

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• 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.

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• Reporting: Vertex VAT Compliance is not fully ready to support all EU country's requirements.
• Data storage.
• Online reporting in VVC: many countries require to report VAT Declaration in an electronic way. This function is still missing for some of the countries from VVC.

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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.

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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.

We are satisfied with the overall performance of Vertex. The software has provided my company with many efficiencies. We have shorted our audits and found that many audits are happy that we are using Vertex to calculate our taxes. We no longer need to worry about updating our rates each month since Vertex sends us a file to upload

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Overall, Avalara has been an excellent resource for the company. We highly recommend it. Once you get familiar with the software it's not hard to navigate and use for your business' needs. There are reports for any type of tax detail you need from individual jurisdiction detail to a comprehensive summary of all states filing or not filing in.

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Vertex itself is very good software. Its tax calculation is very accurate, and there should be no doubt whether Vertex is calculating the tax. Customer support is also good, and the response is quick. The updates are also good and easy to understand, making this an excellent application.

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

I have always felt VERTEX support was available when needed, and I have felt comfortable calling in some heavy hitters when needed

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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

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Our Vertex performance is good, although we are now experiencing Error 502 when adding additional data points to our transaction tester single tests. At Exchange, I was told to reach out to support....that most likely the On Demand system needed some additional CPU resource added. I have a currently open ticket, that has not yet been fixed on this matter

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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.

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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.

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Level 1 support has always been kind and understanding but times they do not always provided the technical help sometimes their response or protocol is not related. I feel that I have to beg for a developer to look over my issue. On the other hand, there have been times a Level 1 support person has taken the time to research my issue and provide valid feedback & solution

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

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By training I'm referring to our engagement with Vertex Consulting's professional services group. Each person on the engagement had prior leasing industry tax experience and most if not all used O Series before joining Vertex. Consultants with industry specific tax experience provide so much more than just "training". They are able to engage in deep tax technical discussions with actual experience while in private practice. This coupled with having visibility to how numerous other leasing peers approach similar tax issues is a huge plus on top of the standard training.

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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.

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Vertex has offered multiple webinars for the products we have purchased that are informative and helpful. I've also attended a few of the Vertex annual conferences where I was able to strength my knowledge of Vertex. I also found that their online library and videos can be helpful in resolving issues and answering questions.

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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.

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The implementation is challenging, make no mistake but will provide much value over time. Make sure you have full support of IT and your major stakeholders in your company. I found that while many people claimed to understand tax was important, they had no idea how deep tax in entrenched throughout the lease life cycle.

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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.

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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!

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In comparison specifically with Avalara, Vertex is better in every way. It is much more customizable and allows us to change the way our tax software is set up for our business needs. Avalara is much more constricted, and is using the SST system which can allow for simplified returns, but in our case was causing more problems. Avalara is also much more expensive than Vertex, for less capabilities. Vertex' customer support is much stronger than Avalara's, as they are focused on obtaining and retaining customers whereas Avalara was continually trying to find ways to get money from us

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It is usable across all departments

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There needs to be a time-consuming setup both in the Enterprise Resource Platform and in Vertex and the related tools as well but once this is all established, Vertex is very proficient at calculating Sales and Use Tax in the USA and in Canada with GST/HST, as well as several of the provinces where we are located. As we added plants in different jurisdictions via greenfield expansion and aquisition, Vertex was able to integrate those as long as the tax department is fully informed of the system.

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• With Avalara, manual tax reporting and calculations have been reduced drastically, reducing manual effort and increasing efficiency.
• Since it is integrated with Sage Intacct, reporting in both Sage Intacct and Avalara is well balanced, and reporting with tax authorities has been handled well.

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• 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.

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• We use Vertex on a monthly basis to see if tax has been over-accrued or over-charged on invoices. We do save tax every month using the tool. Not at liberty to share too much more - the technology does assist the human efforts.

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