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
Xero
Score 8.5 out of 10
N/A
Xero is an online accounting software product for small businesses and personal finance. Its features beyond general ledger and double-bookkeeping include quotable invoicing, bank reconciliation, purchase order and expense management, and tax management. Third party apps can extend its features further.
$13
per month
Pricing
Avalara
Xero
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
Early
$13
per month
Growing
$37
per month
Established
$70
per month
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Avalara
Xero
Free Trial
Yes
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
Yes
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
Optional
No setup fee
Additional Details
—
Prices in table are in USD and just apply to the US - other markets & prices are listed below:
Canada - Starter $18 CAD/month, Standard $45 CAD/month, Premium 5 $58 CAD/month
UK - Starter £14/month, Standard £28/month, Premium £36/month
AU - Starter $29 AUD/month, Standard $59 AUD/month, Premium 5 $76 AUD/month
NZ - Starter $31 NZD/month, Standard $66 NZD/month, Premium $84 NZD/month
It's hard to pick certain experiences because each month we have used Avalara it has provided a great experience and has been well suited for us. We have only one individual that reviews the sales and use tax on a monthly basis to ensure everything is ready to be filed and nothing seems out of the normal. If we did not have this software, this step alone would be extermely time consuming and even may require two people if not one. One experience that sticks out is we had a filing with a state where the state had come back to us and said our filing was incorrect and that we owed a large sum to them for that month being reported. Avalara was aware of the situation and took care of it quickly. I never had to worry once I knew that one of Avalara tax professionals was assisting in the matter. It was nice to know we could focus on other things within our company while knowing Avalara had this handled. I do not have a scenario where it is less appropriate because we purchased everything that is well suited for our company.
Xero is excellent for a small business. In my experience, it's a great tool to allow a small number of users to see what accounting tasks need attention. As an example, if two users are responsible for paying bills the user can very quickly see if the other user has paid a specific bill. I don't have sufficient experience with a larger corporation but assume the lack of a pricing tier based on customer is a significant disadvantage of the software as is the difficulty with inventory management.
Reconciliation of transactions is simple and can be done on a mobile device, meaning accounts can be kept up to date easily whilst away from the office.
Cashflow management is also simple with Xero, it's a few clicks to generate a report on cashflow so you can always be sure how your business is currently fairing.
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.
No ability to set separate email addresses based on roles or document type, e.g. invoices and statements have to go to the same address (or be manually redirected)
Reporting functionality is clunky to use and not very in-depth
Generally seems to be aimed at sole-traders and very small businesses
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.
In addition to the matters covered in this review, my reason for renewing this product is that Xero's functionality and the constant updates that the company provides, makes the software even more business friendly. The software therefore builds a brand loyalty among customers.
My usability rating 5 years ago would have been much lower. I jumped in to the sales tax world with little experience outside the state where my employer is located. I think a structured training program from the outset would have helped. I know tutorials were available, but where to find them, which ones to begin with, etc. made usability very frustrating. I was learning the system but also using the system at the same time to bring my employer into compliance with the new nexus requirements
It is a good piece of software however there are some things not working very well, not improved on despite many years of chasing with the developers. We still use it and still recommend for our clients, so generally the issues are not deal breakers, rather inconveniences. Also making certain addons paid separately, such as app for expenses or CIS is just ridiculous
We have been actively using and 100% Xero based for our ecommerce accounting practice for over 4 years. There has on been one real outage for more than 5 minutes. Xero was open and transparent about the outage, what they were doing to resolve the issue, and provided 15 minute updates. Showing how they care about their customers and partners. Plus, showing that their customers care too, were understanding, and went surfing or in our case took a nap. Couldn't run our business without Xero as a partner.
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
Pages generally load quickly, but it's a fairly common occurrence to have pages taking a bit longer than I'd like to load (as in, 4+ seconds). Occasionally I have to refresh a page to get it to work. Bank feed and integrations tend to be slow in general, but that could easily be due to API latency on the side of the other parties. Most of the time, though, the bank feeds refresh before I login so it's not a huge problem. Not necessarily good performance compared to a local app like QuickBooks desktop, but definitely good performance for a cloud application. Room for growth? yes.
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.
Always respond and keep issues open until you are satisfied with the result. Generally good responses, in the past, I had some support responses that were really basic and really annoying. They type where "have your tried restarting your computer" style of answers. Well, of course, I went through all the basics before contacting them. Duh, but I suppose not everyone does. Otherwise, it would be a 10. The last year has shown a marked improvement in the support responses however.
All of Xero's training is online and available for anyone (business owner or accountants) to learn and become experts in their system. There is a range of content from product training to real world webinars from their partners. Xero is beautiful accounting software and their training is the same.
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.
If it can be done, time the implementation near a new fiscal year so you can start clean. Otherwise, you have to go back and do historical data from the beginning of the fiscal year, which can be brain draining.
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.
Sage is much more difficult to use and far less enjoyable to work with than Xero. Sage just feels 'old fashioned' and cumbersome compared to the streamlined Xero system. We have no regrets in adopting Xero over Sage. Furthermore, Xero is less expensive than Sage. Better system and cheaper! What's not to like?
I have yet to fully stress test the product given the size of the company where I am using it. I am sure as we scale to more customers, more vendors and more reporting requirements, I will have a better understanding of what it is capable of in terms of bandwidth and processing
It is software that, at first glance, generates positive results in the short term, allows us to be efficient, and avoid cumbersome manual work. Manual errors do not exist when we use Xero. The monitoring of our financial and accounting processes is good. It allows us to have everything under control, including the payment of invoices. Each process is controlled with the advantages of this system. It is the perfect accounting software for us as it makes our work process simple and smooth.
