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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 connection between our software and Avalara was seamless.

Avatax is accurate and easy to use.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Businesses with customers in numerous states/localities without a physical presence there (or a limited presence) will greatly benefit.