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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Workday HCM
Score 8.1 out of 10
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Workday Human Capital Management is a cloud-native system offering a globally
consistent user experience. Workday HCM is part of an intelligent, unified system with other
Workday products.
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 …
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.
I would say it's well suited in every environment because I think it does so much. It's like the holy grail of HRIS systems is what I like to call it because thinking about all parts of the employee lifecycle, it lives here in Workday Human Capital Management. So I love the fact that you can do the people data analytics, you can store employee records, the talent acquisition pieces there. I'm thinking I can't think of anything negative right now except for the fact that I can't drill down into the data for the people analytics side. Other than that, I think it's literally, yeah, the holy grail of HRIS systems, I love it and I would highly recommend it.
Groups employees in management hierarchies and creates Org Charts that are easy to navigate and allow for visualizing management chains regardless of employee locations
Intuitive and easy to use. The Workday search functionality works very much like Google; one can search for anything that they have access to in the database and drill down into the various details. All information is connected through hyperlinks and users can easily keep digging into the details for as far as their security access would take them.
Tasks such as to do, review or approve items are sent to the user's Workday Inbox, very much resembling email. Notifications about outstanding "to do" items are also sent to each the user's work email address on a daily basis.
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.
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.
It is work to make one system the source of truth for our data, but now that it is done, there is less work involved in staying on this path. This means for us that maintaining and/or implementing new modules like performance, finance, talent, etc. is simple. It's a no-brainer
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.
Workday's on a great path in terms of user experience. Their goals is to deliver a use experience that doesn't require training or instruction, like Amazon on the consumer side for example. That's hard to do when you're talking about complex business processes and important and sensitive employee information, but they're doing it well
In 2014, Workday has changed the update process. There will be two updates a year; the updates will be delivered to customers typically in a 24 hour window during these two weekends a year. They also keep the Community up-to-date about any planned outages, etc. There is weekly scheduled downtime on Friday night.
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
From my perspective, the system runs like a well oiled machine and I have not had any issues with customers complaining about speed. If a report is taking long to run, the report can run in the background and you can go about your business. For larger enterprises, there is additional space and machines to process the application in what Workday refers to it as Extended Configuration Tenant
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.
Workday is still learning about the needs of higher education. I have seen rapid improvement in support and knowledge over the last year so am confident this will continue to improve. Overall however, I have found the Support Team to be extremely responsive and Workday offers the advantage of having support across several timezones so that we never wait more than a few hours for a response.
Some training is offered online. Cost is per-person. This also gets quite expensive. Training doesn’t follow a logical path A to B. Starts in middle. When you try to do it afterwards at your desk, difficult. • Training scenarios are not very real
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.
I have done for report writing and mass imports (EIBs). They give materials and you run through examples, i.e. you don’t just watch them do tasks, so that is helpful. Training is expensive – a single reporting writing class is $600 per person for virtual training
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.
It was implemented before my joining the company. At my last company, we used Workday professional services.
Based upon my experience at my last company, I would rate the implementation experience an 8/10. There are different ways to set things up and we had different people telling us different things. It set us back a couple of times.
Regarding configuration advice, we could set things up where every manager has supervisory organizations, or have it financially based i.e. aligned to cost center/department. We chose the individual manager path and I think we should have chosen a department route. Going down the individual manager path, to maintain the information, we have to inactivate a supervisory org whenever a manager changes/leaves.
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.
Workday is an incomplete product, by this I mean it must work alongside other products and does not work by itself. Trying to make several different products work smoothly together becomes very challenging. As compared to ADP products, when purchased all together work very well all together. Also, ADP has extensive Training programs and extensive Customer Support. So ADP's products are far superior to Workday's products in my opinion.
Workday has released Financials and is continuing to develop it's Human Capital Management footprint with the addition of Workday Recruiting. I think customers will find that is easy to add on additional functionality in the system. Workday does make it easy for customers to make changes without relying on IT resources. The Business Process framework is a visual tool that allows functional resources to make changes and see the flow of the transaction
Positive ROI, we were one of the first organizations that went with Workday HCM, and we received numerous discounts. Cloud systems are the way to go and we feel the system is stable for our growing work force.
The user conferences have been helpful to network and learn more deepness in the modules and functionality.
Right off the bat, our implementation costs were lower than budgeted and we had less 'billing' surprises.
