Likelihood to Recommend I feel Avalara is the best at helping with sales tax needs. I also know they are opening up more areas to help with business needs. Our only drawback is that since we are a retailer that follows a 4-4-5 monthly calendar, it isn't an option to have Avalara process and submit our taxes monthly.
Read full review Wave Accounting was used for a small practice without a lot of the accounting considerations a large company would have. For the price, you really can't beat what Wave offers out of the box. All of the basic tools for things like invoicing and expenses are all easy to use. End of year accounting is easy with exports of data.
Read full review Pros Sales tax rates at a "roof top" level 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 Read full review Reconciliation is very difficult with multiple Wave transactions that need to be deleted or merged before it can be matched to a bank transaction. Payroll worked fine for us but took several days to get it set up. We have switched to another bookkeeping system and another payroll system. Canceling with Wave took several days and they charge $6 for something even though the month was paid for in advance. Credit card processing is nice and worked fine for us. Read full review Cons I find it virtually impossible to access people when you have issues with anything In my experience, everything runs through account managers and they are non-responsive and unavailable most of the time. In my experience, 99% of all communication with anybody at Avalara has to be done via some ridiculous form or via email. Human contact is extremely difficult to resolve an issue that sometimes requires human to human contact. Read full review I know that credit card processing is a way for Wave to make money, but I really wish they offered ACH payment on Invoices. I do cash-based accounting, which means I have to make little journal entries at the start and end of each year to get my books to balance because Wave wants to do everything differently. This should just be a setting to flip, whether you want cash-based or accrual-based. They use Yodlee for bank connection, which doesn't play nice with 2FA. Pretty much every time I log in I have to re-enter credentials, get a code sent to me, reauthenticate, and know that I'm going to have to do it again next week. Not really on Wave, but wish they could get it together nonetheless. Read full review Likelihood to Renew 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.
Read full review Easy to use for clients with no accounting background and the price is right.
Read full review Usability Usability is simple and user-friendly. It is a very intuitive product. All their products are easy to use. It is one of the major benefits of their products. The ease and user-friendly interface of their products are a time saver in itself. Our associates are not having to retrain for common tasks to find what they need.
Read full review I am a professional bookkeeper and I have no problems using Wave and all of it's features. I can see that certain individuals who have no accounting knowledge might struggle with a few different features and entries, but that is why Wave has an emphasis in connecting users to Wave Pro's who will walk them through things
Read full review Reliability and Availability I have been using Avalara for years and do not remember ever having an outage during working hours. The service is accurate and dependable.
Read full review WAVE is always available when we need it ! Peter
Read full review Performance 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
Read full review Wave does tend to slow down when filtering your transactions screen especially by date. This is more of an issue when trying to trouble shoot certain transactions or clean-up a set of books.
Read full review Support Rating 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.
Read full review I never had to call Wave Support as we barely experienced any support-related problems on our side. However, I do know a few people that complained about Wave support. It would be nice as well, though if they could have more in your face tutorials for new users or how-to videos should we struggle to do something
Read full review In-Person Training I wasn't here when they first started with Avalara.
Read full review Online 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.
Read full review easy to use and east to train on ! Our WAVE clients enjoy the ease of use
Read full review Implementation Rating 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.
Read full review Alternatives Considered 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.
Read full review Wave is FREE for most functions. Payment processing costs no matter where you go (as does payroll or taxes). Wave rises above tools like
QuickBooks Online because they know that for our small firm, being nimble is the name of the game. We don't need exhaustive reporting and management like QB offers and we certainly don't want to pay for it
Read full review Scalability There is no change that has to happen as your company grows, Avalara continues to do it's job for any size company
Read full review Once they out grow what is ability to move up to a more robust system?
Read full review Return on Investment We have been able to keep staffing the same even though business has more than doubled. Avalara filing my returns has cut down on my time spent by hours. I hopeful our new integrations will soon help the rest of the sales staff as well. Read full review Wave has been ROI positive for our company. With not having to pay for the service we can use our money for growing our business. The fees on credit card transactions for invoices are reasonable especially as we don't pay a monthly subscription. The invoicing feature has made our lives easier for us and our customers. The invoicing piece and AR tracking has been ROI positive as well. Read full review ScreenShots