Avalara

We have not used these functions.

Yes absolutely, love these features.

We have benefited from using Avalara to file our Streamlined Sales Tax returns and that has cut our normal filing time in half. Sales tax is what Avalara, in our experience, excels at and that's what we ask them to do and what we expect out them. So, having that help has been great for us and our productivity.

We signed up for the Tax Research tool. It had limited benefit for us.

We have benefited from these additional capablities as it has limited the amount of time we spend on filing returns and has made it easy for us to store exemption certificates. CertCapture works great with Avatax and makes nice to know that the exemption certificate will be applied to the correct customers and transactions on any givne basis especially since majority of our transactions our exempt from sales tax.

Has saved us time filing every month, no need to hire an additional employee to manage sales tax

In my past job, I used the Avalara returns and professional services (e.g., registrations and backfilling)
In my current job, our indirect tax team uses Cert Capture.

We actually don't use any of the above but have considered using the Avalara returns.

Cause us issues because Certcapture would not automatically determine if a client is in a state that gives charities and exemption and whether they are required to submit an exemption letter. You either request an exemption letter from everyone (upsetting those who do not need to do this) or manauly request from each client after manually checking through the library. The only helpful thing was that clients could automatically upload their certificated instead of sending them to us by email.

As mentioned earlier, It auto-files the sales tax returns for each state. It has the capability to capture all customer records for Sales Tax exemption certificates and the validity of it per Customer per state, which enables you to follow up with customers to follow up much before the cert expires and impacts future business. Nexus study helps to understand if a particular commodity is taxable in a particular state and the percentage of tax applicable.

Yes, helped me reduce my returns filing calculation time and improved accuracy of returns and payments. CertCapture has eased the availability of requesting certificates and finding expired certificates.

In my experience, the manager returns works pretty well, unless something is not set up properly then you can have major issues. Of course, I found that trying to figure out what the issues are can be a nightmare. For us, professional services is extremely slow. Sometimes effective and sometimes not.

All of the above we have used because be recently started filing taxes in a new state and they help us in backfiling. Also, provided the training and assisted us in uploading the exemption certificate.

We have not invested in Avalara's different offerings.

The returns are filed on time and I have access to detailed reports.

We have considered using Avalara Returns; however, it currently would cost more than if we do it ourselves. With using SST for free, it might be close. Have not considered using Cert Capture of Professional services items. Our business growth is done through acquisitions so not much needed to our legacy items to need these services.

It's nice to have help with some of the tax returns. I also appreciate any of the SST states making my job easier.

Our Company has benefited greatly using CertCapture. It has allowed us to store all of our customer's tax certificates and has allowed us to set them up in our store as tax exempt, respective to their exempt reason. This is also great because if a state were to audit us, we are easily able to pull up all information and provide it to the state.

Absolutely... 1000%. With the volume and intricacies of our products I can't imagine preparing these returns on a monthly basis. AND... if we didn't have a well structured system in place internally, we'd probably use CertCapture as well.

CertCapture has allowed us to obtain and hold required certificates quickly and easily to ensure that we are in compliance with various states. Avalara returns have saved me 30-40 hours per month / quarter as I am not having to file each individual state anymore.

I highly recommend buying out the entire sweet of solutions at once (Except maybe Business License which you can easily add on later.) Unless you don't have any exempt customers or have a high volume of transactions but only file in a very limited number of states, letting Avalara handle the entire process just makes more sense. We have over 2,500 certificates stored in the system, so tracking those offline and would definitely not work for us. In addition, there is no way the tax charged would be correct. I wouldn't mind a bit more documentation/understanding of the return process and how it would be handled in Audit. For example in WA for the B&O portion you are supposed to classify your exempt sales into different buckets (govt, not for profit, etc), but Avalara just lumps them all into 1 category. It doesn't use the exemption certificates applied to the transaction to code correctly, even though it has access to that data.