CCH SureTax is designed by tax experts to help businesses comply even with the most complex sale and use tax requirements. Always up-to-date on 100,000+ annual tax legislation changes, this cloud-based sales tax automation platform aims to ensure customers accurately calculate, collect, and remit taxes to the correct authorities every time.
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Intuit Mailchimp
Score 8.3 out of 10
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Mailchimp is an email marketing and marketing automation platform. Beyond just tracking how campaigns perform, Mailchimp takes it a step further by analyzing data from over half a billion emails to show why campaigns perform, driving informed decisions.
I would put CCH® SureTax® at the top of the scale for any Telecom business or anyone with a known tax scenario that will be similarly sketchy. This software, while not always user friendly, can do amazing things to help you navigate the tax issues facing us all today. This would not be appropriate for a company just needing help gathering their sales tax information. There are plenty of other, friendlier solutions, possibly what they are already using for their accounting that will do it cleaner, easier and cheaper. You just have to ask an expert in that software.
For any E-commerce related needs, like you need to see a list of customers who have added products to cart but did not purchase, this can be done really easily, but if your e-commerce provider provides integration, then it is best suited. Most of the systems in the Market provide out-of-the-box integration. Their API is also very easy it can be integrated to any language. You can integrate it into your custom developed system and use the features, like adding customers to specific lists. Also, if your lists become really big, then their system can get a bit slow to respond via API, so you might need a strategy for how you are gonna fetch the data using API.
Implements all of the various sales tax rates nationwide automatically.
Clean website that is very user friendly.
Support is very quick to respond and always fixes any issues you may be having.
We have had this since 2013, and not one time has a sales tax rate been wrong. We used to have Avalara, where we had 12 different overrides in their system just to calculate the correct tax. It is nice not having to maintain those.
Mailchimp allows you to manage your mailing list really well. You can subscribe people, unsubscribe people manage the mailing list directly into segments, and what not.
Mailchimp has features where you can create campaigns based on your mailing lists and send out newsletters to your subscribers based on a multitude of parameters that you can setup. Such as send email daily, weekly, monthly and they also have event based mails that you can send out.
Mailchimp also has a feature where you can design your emails. The look and aesthetics are very important when sending emails to your subscribers and all those needs are addressed here.
We have participated in some prepayment testing so we know that functionality is being built out and what we saw looked really good. We're anxious to have that rolled out.
We'd like a cleaner way to export documentation of what was paid and EXACTLY what was paid. Currently web fees and some small balances are not shown by the website and that means making journal entries is a more manual process than hoped.
We've been working with folks at SureTax about discrepancies between CCH RADAR rates vs the rates which get used in SureTax. We have learned the 2 systems do not utilize the same data and we often find RADAR is more accurate.
We switched our tax service from Avalara to SureTax years ago. Prior to this, we manually prepared the data and ran a report uploading and then got the tax result every time. With Suretax providing enough and flexable APIs, we redesigned and implemented our new application to communicate with SureTax seamlessly and automatically. This greatly reduced our workload, improves the system efficiency, and increased the data accuracy.
We've had Mailchimp for about ten years, I want to say. I started with the company about four years ago, and I don't see us ever diverting to another source. It's easy for us to use, and we have all our clients already built into the database. I imagine we'll use them for as long as we have the company.
SureTax is very reliable in with the integration with Microsoft Dynamics GP. It provides accurate tax calculations in accordance with tax updates. SureTax also has a user-friendly interface that makes it easy to navigate. It is easy to add customers and also run reports on the website. The overall manageability of it is great!
The interface is a bit complicated, and I need to spend some time to learn new functions and understanding how it works. I don't like working with email templates because of the limited customization options. However, functions like AI for generating emails, segmentation, and analytics still work well and are very useful.
I have, in the 4+ years that I've used Mailchimp, never seen an issue that restricted the use of their software/tools. I don't know of a single time when they're system crashed or went down. I could be wrong, but I honestly haven't experienced any issues with outages, errors or unplanned downtime
I haven't noticed any slow speeds from Mailchimp or their tools. I think the landing pages load quickly and look nice. The email reports and editing operates smoothly and doesn't take time to load. Additionally, when I use Mailchimp in conjunction with Zapier + Hubspot I don't notice any drag between any of these tools
It has taken much longer than we would like to get certain issues - and problems - resolved. And the initial product support as we designed the implementation left much to be desired
Website tools were easy to use and understand so a novice can easily meet or exceed their client's expectations! Loved that we were able to totally customize so that the e-mail we created conveyed our client's overall messaging consistent with their branding! Client love that we can provide turnkey services to support their sales and marketing teams!
It's pretty easy to get up and running! There's a slight learning curve on a few things, but once you find where everything is located, you can import your list and send your first email. It really makes our clients feel great to see how quickly they can get that first email out.
100% better. Avalara is a self-starter kit where businesses are forced to create and develop their own bundles and product types. The support that you get from the AvaTax is not as user-friendly. SureTax is full of seasoned experts and full of industry leaders. Law firms that I have worked with in the past, as well as other CPAs, only recommend SureTax.
I don't think they are comparable; we use Google Ads to put our website at the top of the list when someone googles certain words. We use meta business to manage our social media. Google aims to gain customers, while Mailchimp is used to interact with both existing and new customers.
Mailchimp over the years I've used it has grown in leaps and bounds. They have added so many additional features than were previously available. They are truly an all-in-one marketing platform now. If you're a small operation and just want to add email to your marketing efforts, they're there for you. If you're a larger operation and want to start sending postcard advertisements, they can do that. If you'd good with that and want to kick up your marketing by going social, you can do that on their platform. They are truly able to be as small as you need, but also get quite large in whatever it is you'd like to do through their system.
Previously we paid $5,200 per year for a standalone telecom tax calculation program. The overall cost of the combined solution that we have is just about the same as the cost of everything that we have before adding that cost in.
Once you add in the additional benefit of the API integration and the automation that's freed up employee time, I think it's fairly safe to say that as we've grown, the combined efficiencies have allowed us to operate with two fewer employees than we would have otherwise needed.
Over past 4 years we have yet to be notified of any errors in our submitted regulatory taxes.
One of my retail web store clients was sending out email specials and notices about once a month. After clicking the send button, we would watch Google Analytics and the current site users would light up immediately. Often, the current site visitors would pop up to 20, 30 or more after the email was sent. On a normal day, seeing 1 or 2 online users would be OK.
Pretty much in all cases, we could see an uptick in positive activity after sending out a Intuit Mailchimp email to a list.