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O&G Service Company - Avalara Review
October 16, 2018

O&G Service Company - Avalara Review

Richard M. Forrest II, CPA | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Modules Used

  • AvaTax

Overall Satisfaction with Avalara

Refinery Specialties uses Avalara to accurately calculate and track sales tax applications applied to our invoicing. Jurisdictions are based on rooftop coordinates that we are able to feed to Avalara for the calculation. We are an oilfield service company and often times it is not easy to identify where a well falls into a jurisdiction.
  • If we give Avalara a pinpoint latitude and longitude coordinate, I am confident in the resulting jurisdiction and tax rates.
  • Avalara provides great training opportunities.
  • The records maintained by Avalara are easily accessible.
  • While Avalara has a robust set of sales tax codes/catagories, they have not yet focused on codes related to our industry.
  • Avalara does not have their own team responsible for connecting their product to our ERP or accounting system.
  • I've been through two large sales tax audits (Louisiana and Texas) since implementing Avalara. In both cases, we were able to provide quick and accurate data to support our tax positions.
From what I understand, we were one of the first to connect Avalara to Microsoft Dynamics SL. The process took longer than expected and the outsourced firm creating the connector was disappointing. In the end, we had to work around unsolvable problems.
  • Our ERP, Solomon, feeds data to Avalara and a calculated tax is returned to our ERP before invoicing.
  • The calculation is based on a location and a tax code. We have flexibility to modify each.
Now that we've worked out the bugs, I feel like the feed back and forth is out of sight, out of mind. I no longer have to worry about the jurisdictions and rates.
We have only scratched the surface with certificate management. We do not use the filings as the costs did not make sense for our level of filing.
We have looked at others but none have the pin point location ability that was a requirement for RSI.
Avalara was our only option as we needed to make sure we correctly identified tax jusrisdictions and we could only rely on lat/long coordinates to do so. The tax codes we are currently using are either very generic or we've made them up ourselves.