Avalara

For us, Avalara has been critical in determining the appropriate tax rate for our ecommerce retail sales. There are thousands of jurisdictions and rates that are changing all the time, so it is critical that companies use a third party that keeps track of this information so that the correct tax amount is collected.

With the current fallout surrounding economic nexus legislation occurring around the country, our company has discovered that we need to register in 21 new states. As we have prepared to enter into these states, we have learned the hard way that our exemption certificates are not up to par and that our current processes for collecting and maintaining them is not adequate for today's environment. Unless you are only in a handful of states with a handful of customers, a software solution is the only way to go, and Avalara's CertCapture is a platform that we are excited to use as it will automate much of the administrative burden behind this process.

Avalara has the monopoly on sales tax filings and this can create a situation where customer service is not a priority, as customers don't really have anywhere else to go for this type of service. It has appeared as though the company grew very quickly, and as the customer we experienced problems due to Avalara's rapid growth. In the past two years my organization has had four customer service reps within Avalara. This does not lend itself to having a CSR that knows our organization and business.

Avalara is well suited for E-commerce. It it very flexible [and able] to integrate with various platforms. Also, the reporting function, [where] users can find the reports that fit their needs easily, is very helpful.

The monthly reports and very helpful for preparing sales tax returns. Pulling transactions for monthly reporting is very helpful. CertCapture is easy to use, but finding out how to do things like requesting certificates within CertCapture has been complicated for me and others in our company.

Great for sales tax remittance. It makes it super easy to file in all necessary areas. If you're a smallish company/department, it's great to not spend a lot of internal man power each month to file. Avalara is remitting sales taxes in about 60 jurisdictions for us. It would take a lot of time for us to individually file and slow our month end process exponentially.

I would definitely recommend Avalara for the ease of compliance due to automation. Filing multiples states makes it so much easier with the help of AvaTax. Spent more time on high level instead of details work.

Avalara is well suited for Tax Calculation for USA. I wonder if Avalara is also available for all countries in the continent (Latin American countries). Our ERP does not have Geo Localization for tracking where our shipments are being shipped to. Most of our shipments are to fields, or a well in the middle of the country, where even the Avalara finds it hard to provide the correct tax percent correct sometimes.

I would recommend Avalara if you have sales in many states and possibilities for sales tax liability in many states. It may not be as useful if you only sell into one or two states. Things are always changing, though. When we started with Avalara a little over 5 years ago we were required to collect and remit sales tax in 2 states. Now we are up to 9 states. If you see your sales makeup changing it's a good idea to have Avalara guide you through.

I think Avalara is well suited for anyone shipping and invoicing customers. Entering certificates on Cert Capture is easy and takes the manual steps out of calculating as assigning taxes on customer invoices.

Companies selling in multiple states and/or using e-commerce.

Avalara is great for e-commerce business.

Avalara does a great job of handling the sales tax in all aspects. It is not clearly stated how little the implementation manager actually participates in the integration. Once you get over the hump of implementation the product works very well.

Great for ecommerce sales tax calculations, nexus determinations and sales tax filing.

If there are no taxable sales, this probably not a needed product.

It is great at having all of the information in one place, directing you to the correct answer.
Wish the exemption certificates were more universal, which would help with verification.

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 does help in calculating the sales tax when the particular state and customer is already set up. However, we still do not feel 100% comfortable using it without double checking the rates ourselves and making sure that we didn't miss a county or city tax that needs to be added. It would be helpful if Avalara would also bring up a note that says that there is a potential additional city/county tax that was not applied that we should at least look into.

Avalara is well-suited to companies that sell in an area with many jurisdictions that need to be collected and filed for. Avalara is also well-suited for a company that sells many different types of items (i.e: tangible, intangible, computer software, rentals, services, consulting). If a company only sells in one place or only has one type of item, this service is not necessary.

Avalara has simplified our sales tax process. We spend less in house time on rates, our costs to have the CPA calculate the sales tax have been eliminated and we have more accurate rates in our system. Avalara has saved us time and money. I highly recommend the program to eliminate the sales tax headache.

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.

I appreciate that I am not depending on employees to calculate the correct amount of tax on orders. It is also nice to know that I can depend on the program to consistently not charge taxes to a customer on items that are non-taxable. All of these things ensure the accuracy of my documents and in the end keeps our customers happy.
I have never had a problem reaching someone at Avalara when I have a question about my service or about my account. It is nice to have trusted source to turn to when I have a question on a topic as complicated as sales and use taxes.

It works great for us as we need the help with all of the returns.

Avalara Avatax is well suited for businesses that sell nationally and want to be covered in case of an audit. It is especially ideal for businesses with locations across multiple states as it allows fairly easy and straightforward management of not only the sales tax calculations but also exemption paperwork for customers within these states.

Suitable for any company operating in the US that is currently manually calculating/filing sales taxes for customers based in the US.

Avalara is well suited to anyone who needs to track a lot of transactions and uses an ERP. I'm sure it is also good for those who upload transactions, but I do not have experience with that.