Item: Avalara
Rating: 10
Author: Verified User

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Avalara in conjunction with Salesforce. Avalara provides sales tax data to our Salesforce opportunities, and, in turn, Salesforce sends information on closed sales to Avalara for sales tax return filings. In a sense, Avalara is used by our entire company, but as far as direct users go, it's strictly within the accounting department.

Pros and Cons

Avalara provides up-to-date sales tax rates and taxability information to us.
Our sales tax returns are filed timely and almost never require adjustment.

Avalara is not very forthcoming regarding the rationale they use for deciding whether a particular item is taxable or not. They haven't been wrong so far, but openness is generally better in this area.
Copies of returns are not available. You have to go to the taxing authority to get them.
Better, more in depth reporting for sales tax returns is not yet available. We would like to see more variables available in reporting here.

Return on Investment

It would be virtually impossible to operate in some states, such as TX or CA, with as many tax jurisdictions as they have without AvaTax.
As far as returns go, outsourcing them has been a mixed bag. The time saved is not an overwhelming savings, but not having the aggravation of trying to figure out some of the returns has certainly made our lives easier.