Avalara Reviews

If you are growing online sales and meeting economic thresholds, it is a must; especially if you do not have the time or expertise to do it in-house or your CPA does not specialize in sales tax.

If you need a tool that can integrate well with your ERP system, this may likely be right for you.

If you meet economic thresholds but have a very limited number of transactions and sell into a limited number of taxing jurisdictions, and you have the staff to handle the process, it might not be appropriate.

Once integrated and properly set up, the software does most of the work for you. There are occasional hiccups, but that is true of all software. A lot of the ease depends on to what extent you let the platform do for you versus what you take on. For us, it decides which transaction to tax, assesses the tax rate based on the specific jurisdiction (and any changes in the tax rate), stores the exemption certificates and files the returns. Mostly what we are responsible for is reconciling the ledgers to the tax liability worksheets. It turns a complex and long set of tasks into a fairly simple and quick process.

We have found Avalara to be very well suited for ecommerce. With the available connectors, we can set up the connections once and they then run extremely reliably. We have recently moved to using Avalara's SST services, which will help save a significant amount of money.

Avalara is very easy to use. Their site makes it easy to see your transactions and how much tax to each state you owe. I do always have difficulty finding the area on their site to make changes to states. Also I find their custom reports a bit of a challenge to use on their site.

I would never recommend Avalara to anyone who uses Magento. They are unfamiliar with their own platform, let alone Magento. They have no idea how their own API works. I got conflicting tech support every single time I called. I was given the number of the firm that originally built their product, Classy Llama, and when I called them, they were so fed up with Avalara and told me terrible things about working for them. They offered to fix my problem with the integration for $5000. In months of working with Avalara they were never able to sync any part of their API. Not only did the most basic part of their extension not work, their address validation component broke our cart. Eventually they told me they would not support my installation, when they realized that they had no idea how to. They offered me a refund and now its been 3 months trying to get them to refund my installation while they continue to charge me for future services. I can't get my rep to respond for almost 2 months. I finally got them to remove the current charge, but they refuse to reply to me about the original charge.

I was never able to use the product and neither were they. They weren't able to get the order sync to work consistently. No one from the Avalara team was able to tell me what was wrong. They couldn't figure out the problem. I spoke with at least 5 different agents.

In this day and age, you simply cannot administer your own sales tax calculation and reporting scheme. You will lose more in a single sales tax audit in fees and penalties than you pay to have a competent software package do the calculations and reporting and administration of certificates for you. AvaTax integrates directly with our quoting, order and invoicing modules in our ERP system so it runs in the background and does so flawlessly. If you are invoicing more than 50 customers a month, you need a tool like AvaTax and Certcapture to take away the administrative burden.

No system is perfect but Avalara has achieved the goal of making a fairly complex problem (almost) go away for companies like ours. Their website and UI are outstanding as they are intuitive and responsive and require the minimum number of clicks to accomplish what you want to do. The system rarely goes down and when it does it does not last. When I had an issue with a report that suddenly began omitting some data I needed to complete my return, I contacted the company and was able to show them the issue and they got it corrected.

Avalara helps in the capturing the appropriate sales tax for state, city and county. No matter what business you are in, this is the important part of the package and reason you are looking for a company like Avalara. They have a good support team and are responsive.

Easy to use as accountant. All the information you need is available and easy to capture.

Avalara has really simplified the reporting and upkeep of our tax reporting. Everything is in one spot and easy to navigate and track. The implementation was easy and the implementation team was very helpful.

The software is easy to use and navigate in order to store or pull the necessary reports needed for taxation.

The connection between our software and Avalara was seamless.

Easy to use. Could use some work on the Cert Capture with regards to sending emails from the system.

Avatax is accurate and easy to use.

Once Avalara was set up and the results were verified to be correct, no additional maintenance has been needed. Reporting from the system is great.

I would be very careful when using Avalara for industries outside of retail, for example. We are a construction company and didn't always find the most appropriate answers for our complex projects. Other resources are better suited for the construction industry. For example, TTR (Transaction Tax Resource) provides appropriate answers for more complex construction projects.

Although we have some serious reservations about using Avalara again with respect to specific, construction-oriented, tax questions, the service itself is not a poor product. The staff at Avalara are amiable and very useful when you are having a problem. Thus, the overall usability is a good fit for most individuals or companies.

It is amazing for Domestic US taxes, however, not being able to convert to CAD is a huge headache when it requires downloading data to do manual conversions for CAD filing.

It is very explanatory if you have even a small amount of tax understanding and computer comprehension. I feel that each step is easy to understand and follow.

Avalara is great for manufacturers, especially their AvaTax and CertCapture services. It will promote a company to get current with technology and streamline their business process. It helps minimize paper by storing all returns electronically for you.

It is a decent system to use, it is user-friendly. However, there have been hiccups in implementation, or time spent to resolve issues. AvaTax system has miscalculated sales tax l even though the import transactions were correct, completed, committed, and had a different total. AvaTax also has a lot of issues with custom tax rules. For example they told me freight in Illinois will always be taxed, but the system never assessed sales tax on freight invoice lines without us forcing it through a custom tax rule. Which also had a lot of issues with the set up

Avalara is well suited for ecommerce, simple integrations, unsophisticated or nonexistent tax departments, simple invoicing process with tax - it is a rate calculator with a taxability mapping interface which can allow one to set up tax and collect across the country without having to set up separate codes by state.

100% better than manual and in some taxpayer instances can achieve greater than 80% risk mitigation - but it is not "set it and forget it," taxpayers must understand their nexus footprint, their taxability determinations and reporting obligations to work hand in hand with automation.

Avalara does a great job with usual sales tax calculations, but it needs a bit of improvement in trickier or unusual sales tax calculations/exemptions.

The application (Avalara Identity) is very user-friendly, in my opinion.

They were not so good in the beginning but since the implementation of submitting cases online their support has improved. I do find some support techs are very knowledgeable but while some are not. Also sometime it can be very difficult to understand a support tech as their English language skills may not be very proficient.

Not sure what you mean by this question

Avalara provides a State verification link provided when entering the tax ID number, and the tax ID number format is also provided. The customer list upload templates are also great.

It is user-friendly and provides a lot of supports.

the response is fast and useful.

Avalara is well-suited to a company that has accounting software that has the ability to integrate through API. It becomes more manual when you have a situation where third-party software does not integrate well.

Once the data is contained inside of Avalara, the system is very user-friendly when it comes to looking at and using the data.

We use it for tax calculation. We do not use it for filing sales tax returns, as it is less cost-effective vs having an employee complete them internally.

Does a good job for what we need.

Avalara can appropriately calculate tax for straight forward transactions. However, it is not very reliable for calculating tax for complicated seniors or invoices. For example, multiple line items with multiple shipping addresses. Coding can be faulty.

Complications with invoices that have multiple line items.

Setting up everything, the customer service department stayed on the phone with me the entire time walking me through it and they also were right there watching me via the computer the first time I filed the return. They have been a help ever since when needed.

Very easy to navigate

the e-mail you have to send to support back and forth is not easy. Easier to make a 5 mion call then hours on e-mails

Avalara is well suited to situations where you have a formal invoicing software system, and you need to have sales tax automatically calculated. The interface between Avalara and Intacct is what really sold us on the software.

There are a few parts of the user interface that are not intuitive, such as running reports. But for the most part, the software is very easy to use. The Integration with Sage Intacct was smooth, and we never had to do any tweaks to it. The only issues I had where I had to talk to someone from Avalara had to do with custom tax codes, which would not be easy in any system.

It is well suited for a business that needs to be registered in more than 15 states.

It saved us a lot of time in filing sales tax.

When the system runs well, Avalara is a great system and replaces a lot of manual work. But if there are issues and questions, it's impossible to resolve since we don't have reliable support.

It's easy to use once integrated and easy to maintain. It just runs in the background without much thought.

Avalara is best suited for companies with broad nexus and/or rapid growth. CertCapture is excellent for companies that have a large number of wholesale customers as well as retail customers.
Avalara is less appropriate if you don't know where you have nexus, or always have a tax professional review before registering in new states.

More user training would be great. We were repeatedly told that reporting was unavailable due to us not using the filing features, but recently found out we've had access all along to very useful reports.

There is no change that has to happen as your company grows, Avalara continues to do it's job for any size company

Avalara is particularly well-suited to businesses that sell to customers in multiple states or countries. Additionally, it works very well for helping with figuring out taxes within a state when sometimes different counties, cities, or even neighborhoods have different tax rates! It would not be suited well if you have one location and simple taxes.

Avalara is extremely easy to use as it is easily integrated.

To my knowledge, we aren't aware of a great software for the Resale Tax Exemption Certificate need we have. So it does work to store, and collect, tax certs even if parts seem clunky to me. If we did not have it, it would make collecting & storing the certificates much more laborious.

Need to hit refresh often during process to add a certificate, and then they are not always there for a long time. Campaigns to collect new certs can have their own issues with knowing who all did and did not receive our email like if it was undeliverable. And when a document comes in from a dealer that is a failed transfer, we have no idea to know who actually sent it to let them know it failed and to try again.

Avalara is well suited for anyone that has to file taxes in multiple states or has customers with tax-exempt certificates that are job-specific or in various states. With the changing laws, it helps us stay informed.

It is very easy to use and intuitive for almost anyone.