Avalara

I've honestly never paid SO MUCH for a service and received such terrible customer support. Not only could I not get ahold of anyone to help me for months on end to answer basic questions, but they have no systems for catching errors, whatsoever. I've switched to Galvix, and while I knew Avalara was screwing things up, I didn't realize just how badly they were screwing things up until another tax expert audited what they were doing for me.
Overall, they're very strong in sales and securing your contract, but very weak in actually executing the contract. You'll be wowed in month one, but continually disappointed after that.

Avalara is great for general compliance but still needs better integrations.

Sales tax if set up properly is calculated perfectly. CertCapture works great most of the time but there are some issues with certificates not being applied or being applied. Issues with single-use certificates.

Any company or entity or person that sells goods or provides services that may or may not be eligible for sales tax could easily utilize Avalara. Multi-State entities could also use Avalara simply because Avalara maintains the tax rates not just at the state level but the municipal and special jurisdictions which most people would find difficult or impossible to track accurately over time.

The best I can do is a two. Our experience has been so bad, the software is not good in lots of respects, and the customer service people are either too overwhelmed with people with issues that they can't respond or they just don't care to respond. And the services come at a premium price. So you would think we could at least get a response.

I know Avalara has real tax expertise deep inside that company. But the tools and processes they have cobbled together to monetize that expertise are not delivering a good experience. And their customer support is literally the worst I have ever experienced--and particularly coming from a premium provider.

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.

Using Avalara has cut my time spent on taxes by more than half.

Compatible settings with the order management platform. We had issues with the Kibo platform connecting with AvaTax in the past.

The sales state tax returns and Avatax platform are great! Completely makes it doable for small businesses to manage e-commerce. The downside is the financial cost of these services. A bundle package would be great.

Backfilling and follow up email to update status.
Account manager will follow up with us if we need to upgrade our renewal.
Please continue to provide free webinars.

Avalara is great if you have NetSuite and want your sales tax data tracked well. The use tax with NetSuite doesn't work as well as the sales tax, you have to click certain settings to just always track certain vendors. It would be great if it could somehow scan details to determine if use tax is necessary or not.

In my opinion, not an ethical company and I would not recommend it

The client, which is having multiple entities, maximum commodities, exemption certificates for each of the state for each of the customers, auto filing sales returns, Avalara interfacing with other applications is the best experience and well suited for most of the industries.

The clients with one entity and commodities or nature of business (Non profit organization) where sales tax is not applicable. It doesn't suit.

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.

Multi state sales tax returns. I think the software is pretty good although it’s not intuitive. I found it takes some time to get used to using and you’re pretty much on your own. In my experience, they will not give professional advice. However, sometimes I think there is such a fine line that it is indistinguishable and, in my experience, they lead you right up to that line and then just stop.

Initially, we are used to 1 state and later we are to file 4 States' tax and which reduced our time for calculating tax.

A small business with presence in many states is not quite the market Avalara is geared towards; the cost can be high in this situation. The products are excellent, but they do come with a high cost for us smaller businesses.

Avalara integrates well with the two ERP systems currently in use and is suitable for all invoicing needs.

We had a situation where it appears sales tax was not being calculated correctly on a TN sale as the local jurisdiction did not have tax on the entire sale. However, that specific local jurisdiction has a max taxability and there is no way that I would have known about this without the use of Avalara. Given we just have to code the sale and then it determines taxability in all the various states, plus local jurisdictions, it would be impossible to handle the sales tax function without the use of a software like Avalara.

Avalara does a great job at helping to make sure we are charging the customer the correct sales tax amount to customers. If you only have nexus in one state, it may not be 100% necessary but as nexus grows it's an invaluable resource in making sure we stay compliant.

Sales tax is complicated and you need to have a software that can help you track it all. Avalara does this pretty well over all.

Avalara has been useful to our Company especially because we are eCommerce retail. It has allowed our customers to easily provide their tax certificate so they can be set up in our system as tax exempt. The integration of CertCapture to Shopify is also great because the tax calculations are automated and every state is different. The only thing I would change is offering more bundles with better pricing; our Company currently pays for the premium, however, we don't use all campaign side of what Avalara offers. We are essentially paying for a side of Avalara that we don't use, so if they were to provide just the CertCapture side of things, without having to bundle it with the campaign side, it would be more useful.

I can't think of any area where it wouldn't be an asset to your company. The peace of mind that it gives any company that you are collecting and remitting the correct sales tax is invaluable. It is expensive, but when you realize that you would need a team to navigate the calculation of sales tax for every local, district and state sales tax rate where you ship, it would be mind boggling. It is an expense... a cost of doing business, but money well spent.

Avalara is definitely suited for multi-division, multi-state companies to ensure compliance with tax billings and filings. It is also very helpful with the CertCapture to ensure that all Certificates are valid and reporting on expiring/expired certificates. The best feature is the ability to send a formatted letter that has the link for the customers to submit certificates directly to CertCapture.

Before we signed up to start using Avalara I was manually calculating and filing 12 returns a month. It would take me an entire day during the close, and every month I would identify invoices which had the incorrect rate on them and had to be adjusted. Most times we couldn't go back to invoice the customer, so we were out of pocket for the difference. I would guess anyone who moves beyond their home state for shipping to customers could benefit from using Avalara as you are just not as familiar with the tax situation - especially if you live in a state charging local taxes.