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Professional Services Review
September 26, 2018

Professional Services Review

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Modules Used

  • AvaTax

Overall Satisfaction with Avalara

It is being used by accounting specifically. We use it to process our monthly sales tax returns. We use Intacct for our ERP and due to the simplicity of the default sales tax module and the complexity of the PA tax code, we had to turn to Avalara
  • Accounts for sales tax remittances
  • Provides historical sales tax remittance data
  • At least when vetting the software...it did not handle the use tax side of the equation particularly well and we still need to do that manually by assigning GL accounts for the individual states in every transaction surround use tax.
  • On occasion when either Intacct and/or Avalara has updates to their software, it crashes the API connection. When that connection crashes everything on the order entry side of the fence grinds to a halt as no transactions can be processed. Needs to be escalated to engineering at either Avalara or Intacct.
  • I cannot say that it has provided an ROI. We only submit state taxes in 3 states and are pretty on top of when rates vary in say Ohio or Pennsylvania. It is just a necessary expense due to our Intacct setup.
Trying to find the right tax code that is applicable to our business was miserable. We needed a tax code that, no matter what was put, would not generate a sales tax and that seemed extremely difficult for them to do.
  • Intacct
Every invoice transaction in Intacct utilizes the API. 3500 transactions a month or so. Once that code was found that never generated a tax line item, it was not difficult.
Fairly straight-forward. Easy to determine liabilities etc.
If we sold a product, then I could see the benefit of managed returns...we, however, offer a service so the burden to file returns is not over the top. We have utilized the certificate management piece but it so rarely comes up as an issue that its hard to put a benefit associated with it.
It was the only thing that was recommended to us by our Intacct integrator so nothing else was ever vetted.
For multi-state and multi-jurisdiction sales tax returns, it is beneficial. I think if you are not in PA, however, you could get away with just utilizing the out of the box Intacct sales tax module. PA is a different ball of wax though in the professional services space.