Avalara

Avalara personnel are excellent at explaining technical sales tax issues in layman's terms to help customers develop a clearer understanding of the issue(s) at hand. They suggest possible approaches to issues that arise and also provide the pros and cons of each.

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.

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.

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.

The connection between our software and Avalara was seamless.

Avatax is accurate and easy to use.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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 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.

It is well suited for a business that needs to be registered in more than 15 states.

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 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 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.

Sales tax management is tough. Companies of all sizes need help and will likely never be able to hire experts to manage it on their own. That said, I have used Avalara at a $10 billion company, a $1 billion company, a $100 million company and now with 2 companies - a $30 million company and a $40 million company. It is complicated. Avalara is good at making sure the right tax rates are applied to the right sales transactions.

We also need help managing International Sales, so, not sure how well versed Avalara is with that.

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.

I've used other platforms and I don't think there is a more accurate or better platform for sales tax compliance on the market. It's better than doing it yourself. I would highly recommend Avalara.

If you are in difficult states to file or have more than you can handle staff-wise, then this is a great alternative. Avalara will provide a great way to pull all your data into a concise form and file the taxes for you. You must manage the business licenses and registrations in order for Avalara to file taxes.

I find it as a great customer record tool and recommend it for any business that deals with a lot of exemptions from customers. They are expanding on outbound exemptions as well which is a plus if your company does a lot of tax exempt purchases.