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Great product for tax calculation
October 05, 2018

Great product for tax calculation

Summer Redmon, CPA | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Modules Used

  • AvaTax

Overall Satisfaction with Avalara

It is being used by the finance department to calculate sales tax for our customer invoicing. As we expand into other states, it's been difficult to track which areas charge sales tax and how much. This tool allows us to have that calculated for us without worrying whether it's accurate.
  • The automatic calculation of taxes based on location is great. It reduces any anxiety that we are miscalculating taxes.
  • One area where we had an issue was when we had a customer which had locations in different states. We needed to calculate taxes for one of their locations, but it automatically calculated off of the main location's tax rates. This was really an issue on our end, but some additional support for understanding how to make sure everything in our accounting system was set up to calculate correctly with AvaTax would have been helpful.
  • Avalara has definitely improved our sales tax compliance and reduced our workload. It has sped up the process by auto-calculating everything and allowing my staff accounting to pull out data she knows is correct to do our filings in the various states in which we operate.
We chose to do self-implementation. I was a little disappointed in how it went, specifically because it was difficult to find the information we needed to make the implementation a success. The person we worked with on our ERP side provided us documents, however, they gave us the wrong information (possibly for a prior version of Avalara?) and finding the information on the Avalara website was confusing and time-consuming. If self-implementation is going to be provided as an option, I would hope that information would be easier to find and understand.
  • We integrated our ERP, Sage Intacct, with Avalara.
The integration allows the two systems to talk to each other and allows Avalara to provide tax rate info to Intacct. See my previous note regarding the self-implementation.
Other than the initial implementation, the system has been very easy to use and provided us with the data we need.
We have not utilized these services, but we may. At this point it was not worth the cost, but as we grow that might change.
We have not used or evaluated any other products.
Avalara is great for calculating tax on invoices. We haven't used them for filing yet, but I'm going to guess that is probably great too. However, we used self-implementation for the tax calculation portion and I think we would definitely want to use a guided implementation if we were to bring on tax filing as well.