Avalara

The ease of electronic filing of returns certainly provides an efficient and effective way to maintain compliance with various tax jurisdictions. Recognizing many jurisdictions require efiling, the tables and other factors of setup within the Avalara system provide ease of use for our compliance obligations.

CertCapture has been easy to navigate and streamline our process in uploading certificates much more efficiently.

As mentioned earlier, CertCapture is a tremendous help to us as the majority of our customers are dealers selling to end-users and, thus are exempt for resale purposes. Sending campaigns upon initial registration in the states and then follow-up campaigns for the states whose certificates expire have been very useful and saved much time and money.

Avalara has saved us time in filing and registrations for sales and use tax returns.

We use Avalara to help calculate and double check our perceived and actual sales tax exposure and filing requirement.

fast and easy

My colleagues work with this portion of the application and I am unable to comment on how this is working for them.

VDA work saved us time and money.

None as of today but we are hoping we can use other additional capabilities of the software soon.

We are planning to use cert capture in the very near future.

We have used both Returns and CertCapture. The CertCapture, now ECM seems to work perfectly. However; this, like all of Avalara's features, was much harder to implement than expected. I would strongly suggest an implementation and training budget to supplement whatever funds have been allocated for operations. Perhaps they could just offer two levels of service.

We benefit a lot from CertCapture and Avatax as a combination. CertCapture keeps track of all the customer exemptions or taxabilities. Then Avatax is able to pull the information and make the decision on whether the invoice needs to include sales tax for the customer. Can't imagine using Avatax without CertCapture.

Yes, we have now that we have to pay sales tax in each state instead of just Wisconsin, it would be too difficult for one person to file all those returns.

We have benefited from these additional capabilities by realizing a reduction of labor hours and material costs related to collecting and maintaining tax certificates and filings. By using Avalara products, we have realized more confidence we are complying with a vast array of tax compliance requirements than before partnering with Avalara.

We are using Avalara due to the high number of exemption certificates that we need to manage. Prior to CertCapture, we had them saved in digital format and were just hoping that they were correct. When we need to request a new one, it would take weeks just to figure out who we would need to request new ones from. Avalara has provided us a way to capture, store, request and verify that we have the correct form in far less time than before.

Sales tax returns are a pain, so glad to have Avalara returns taking care of it for us.

We have not had to hire someone in house to maintain and handle all sales tax reporting and returns.

Avalara Returns- no issues or complaints once we got everything set up. CertCapture- could be more user-friendly; training upon implementation was minimal. Professional Services- we utilized this for initial certificate collection and in my opinion, it was horrible. We utilized the team to run 2 campaigns; the 2nd campaign they emailed out incorrectly the wrong template to the wrong group. Response times from our Avalara PS team contact were horrible. It takes a minimum of 2 weeks to get a campaign turned around, which seems unnecessary for it to take that long. We did not even utilize all of the purchased resources as our experience with them was awful. The sales pitch we received made it seem like this service was end-to-end for collecting all required exemption certificates, but that was not the case. They also made it seem like there was no way for us to go about doing that work ourselves without individually emailing or calling customers. Had I known I would be able to generate distributions to specific customer listings on my own, I never would have purchased Professional Services work.

We have benefited from the Avalara returns capability with how user friendly it can be. We tried Professional Services when working on a VDA and after a few unsuccessful weeks of getting the process moving, we cancelled. I am not sure if we use or have used CertCapture in our business.

We have used Avalara to file back returns. We have found it challenging to contact resources in order to discuss and resolve issues

We do not use any other of Avalara services.

All these services have allowed sales tax reconciliation and compliance to be a one person job each month. This involves filing 25-30 different returns each period across all our branches.

Our company has benefited from both Avalara return service and CertCapture, and we hope to use other services in the near future.