OVERWHELMINGLY Customer Focused! Unbeatable tax service!
October 16, 2018
OVERWHELMINGLY Customer Focused! Unbeatable tax service!
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Modules Used
- AvaTax
- CertCapture
Overall Satisfaction with Avalara
It is used across the entire organization to calculate and record sales taxes for our company's online, retail, phone, and return transactions, as well as verify and store tax exempt certificates for all wholesale accounts. This, in turn, assists us in filing taxes each year for all 50 states within the US, as well as federally.
- Monitoring and support for their provided services and systems. They always notify US of a service concern/outage before we notify them. They send constant updates while resolving any system-wide issue. We never are left in the dark when something isn't working.
- They have a very stable system. We are grateful for their excellent communication when such events do occur, though they are few and far between.
- Our account management is unparalleled. There is always someone available to answer quick questions or get an issue escalated when it needs more attention. When major issues arise, we easily get higher level management involved when necessary (Ex. development changes to software).
- The development teams they work with for the Avatax connector are in Argentina and do not have the best conference call capabilities. This can sometimes hinder resolution of development level issues.
- The development teams they work with for the Avatax connector also have a history of being disorganized and hard to get ahold of. Maybe it's just an issue of limited resources? Avalara is very good at engaging them again when this is a challenge though. It just sometimes makes projects take longer than necessary.
- There are some features of the Avatax connector we use to interact with Avalara that are inefficient but to get them fixed the process is very slow and complicated (Ex.1 on Wholesale accounts with valid tax exempt certificates, every line of the sales order still gets checked for sales tax as it is entered and at the end of entering sometimes up to 300 lines, it checks every line again when completing the "add" action for the sales order. Ex.2 when running the invoice creation wizard it checks every line of a Wholesale invoice again to calculate tax, which slows down invoice generation considerably, when it should just check for a valid certificate and skip the sales tax calculation part. These things take a long time, 6-9 months, to address)
- We are completing our first year with Avatax currently and have not had to complete any significant tax compliance operations/filing yet. We expect it to cut working hours in half from the previous year's work though. It is an amazing tool for this part of our business and in the limited use we have had for it thus far, it has been great.
- We had a very well functioning tax calculation tool previously, and this one works nearly as seamlessly as before. One downside has been the wholesale tax calculation issues previously mentioned. This happens in our ERP software SAP Business One. It slows down order entry a lot, but we hope someday to get this fixed with Argentis. We have actually now added a Wholesale Accounting person to help with the extra time and concerns it causes this department.
- We have a negative problem with the time it taxes Avatax to process all the tax calculations on phone orders in our Call Center as well. Due to checking each line individually as it is entered in the order, as well as checking tax calculations again at the end of the order entry process when the order is added. We also hope to resolve this at some point with Argentis, however it is an ongoing negative impact to our customers as they are required to wait twice as long to get their items loaded into a new order over the phone.
- A recently developed and tested Avatax invoice generation solution that is web-based has helped us minimize people working late hours to create invoices after shipping is completed each day. This was previously required due to a problem the invoicing process was creating for our website order update exports. So it was a huge win with positive impact to the Finance team's work life balance.
- I am not sure what the answer is to this question, as I am not in Finance, I am in IT support, and we have not trained or helped the team yet with returns filing. We do use the exemption certificate management tool though and we absolutely love it. It has been a HUGE win for our team. Very easy to use and a huge value add.
This is a lot less time and resource consuming than the previous solutions we used, however I was not with the company long with the old system and therefore do not have a full answer to this. Previous roles I've had did not involve tax products, only ERP solutions.
Avalara Implementation
Integrating Avalara
- Magento E-Commerce website
- SAP Business One ERP software
- Boyum iPayment credit card processing software
Connecting to Avalara for these applications was not difficult. However getting them all to play nice with each other was hard. Not to the fault of Avalara in the end or the Avatax connector, more issues with the ERP solution.