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.
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Vertex
Score 8.1 out of 10
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Vertex combines tax research with technology to improve tax accuracy and
consistency on sales and purchase transactions. The automation aims to support high volume and complex transactions at speed and scale to streamline internal
processes and improve audit performance. Integrations to
ERP, e-commerce, procurement, and other billing systems enables a single tax
engine to seamlessly support a growing business. In addition to tax
determination, Vertex provides tools and services to automate and…
It isn't really comparable because when I implemented Vertex, I only had one operating system to connect to, but in my current position, I have multiple OS's to build APIs for.
Avalara is significantly more user friendly than the Vertex product we previously had. It also makes the taxability determinations and our Vertex product did not do that without us manually setting up and/or changing the taxability.
Chargebee had an agreement with Avalara so we could not use our current provider for sales tax. Avalara is good for sales tax collection, and even easier to set up, but Vertex Returns was better because once it was set up there were fewer issues than we have had with Avalara, …
Avalara
and Vertex are cloud-based solutions for sales tax compliance, but they differ in features, pricing, and customer reviews. Avalara and Vertex offer tax calculation, tax filing, exemption management, reporting, and audit trail features. However, Avalara claims to have …
Setting up a state in Vertex was not intuitive or user friendly. The system itself was clunky. Trying to set up a custom tax override was a nightmare. Whereas any of these tasks are very simple with Avalara. Setting up a state is as simple as checking a box and entering a start …
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 …
I think what is good about AvaTax is the interface is easier to work with if you are a non-IT person. Not all products are as easy to use. Another good thing is the low cost of implementation. Other tax systems are not as affordable as Avalara products.
I've used similar products, but I find the user interface to be more user-friendly with Avalara. In our organization, we have many non-tax experienced personnel handling responsibilities involving Avalara. In this situation, an easy-to-use interface is extremely important and …
I am not a fan of Vertex. I prefer Avalara much more. TaxJar is great for small e-commerce businesses or e-commerce businesses with simple transactions that require little to no tax decision making. Avalara is great for medium or larger enterprises, and I would always recommend …
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 …
Our company is way too large and has way too many transactions on a daily basis for a system like Avalara, and it was not able to handle all the data. With that said, it was a no brainer that our company to go with Vertex O Series for sales tax and procurement.
Avalara has a more intuitive user interface, but I find that the transaction detail I need isn’t there (Shopify Plus), so I use Avalara just for real-time rate calculations. Am not impressed with Avalara’s reports, so I rely on the Shopify transaction export for tax filing …
Avalara does not have the ability to write custom rules within the software to handle complex tax scenarios. It also does not have the ability to automate consumers use tax. If you have a complex ERP such as Oracle or SAP, Avalara will not be able to provide you support since …
Overall, my peers have recommended against Avalara, purely from a customer service perspective. According to my peers that have utilized Avalara, their customer service is the worst, including not having a dedicated person they can go to resolve issues and delayed response …
TaxJar had a limited number of products covered when we assessed their product. Their API did appear to be cleaner than Vertex's, and other options Sovos did appear to have a good number of tax codes; however, their pricing and APIs were not as good as Vertex's. Avalara, at …
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 …
I haven't evaluated anything else or any other products like Vertex. I have only seen some of the Comparisons between Avalara and Vertex. I don't remember much in terms of differences.
In my opinion, there is no comparison of Vertex customer service oriented approach to clients vs. Avalara. I think Vertex by far outshines Avalara 10 to 1. In my experience, communication with Vertex is much more streamlined and handled efficiently than with Avalara. In my …
The functionality and feature set is similar. However, I prefer Vertex's UI over ONESOURCE. I have found Vertex to have certain taxability categories that ONESOURCE did not have historically.
Avalara is well suited for us because it makes it easier for us to navigate sales tax and filing state sales tax returns for multiple states. I appreciate how simple they made this process for us, helps save us a great amount of time and allows us to focus on the business. Less appropriate, is that most of our customers are sales exempt and it can be a bit challenging at times with AvaTax overriding our tax calculation within NetSuite. Overall, that issue has been less and less, so we are moving in the right direction.
It is easy to use, and the user interface is very interactive. A beginner can also work with ease and have no difficulty accessing Vertex. It is straightforward to understand how Vertex works. The tax calculation mechanism is good and accurate.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
I only say this because we had no real training on the system at all. We requested it multiple times, and no one could give us that. We had to figure a lot out for ourselves, got a rep change and finally got someone to help us navigate a bit better. Please make sure any onboarding clients get proper training and resources before going live.
Great program, but a lot of features are still manual. It's difficult to set recurring monthly reports in a time frame of "Previous Month" and we have to kick them off. We have to manually delete reports, there isn't an option to choose multiple at once. Data that is transferred into Vertex returns is quirky as well, taking multiple steps to update lines of data.
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
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
In my experience, numerous questions, and particularly those regarding billing issues are just ignored, and it is impossible to get to someone to discuss. Your account manager will tell you they are taking care of it and then it just goes into a black hole.
I cannot speak from personal experience, but our IT staff has found contacting Vertex support staff to be challenging. One coworker has gone through several support tickets because he was an unrecognized contact. He has also expressed frustration that communication with support staff is conducted solely by email, drawing out issues over an extended length of time that could be more easily resolved by a brief phone call.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
