Manually calculating sales tax and filing returns yourself? WHY?! Avalara does that for you!
December 05, 2018

Manually calculating sales tax and filing returns yourself? WHY?! Avalara does that for you!

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Modules Used

  • AvaTax
  • Returns

Overall Satisfaction with Avalara

We use Avalara to automate our tax tables, and to file our monthly state sales taxes. It is used by our finance department only. It addresses the problem of constantly having to change tax rates manually in Excel and uploading them each month. Avalara changes in real time on the back end so you do not need to worry. It also addresses having to manually calculate sales tax each month and actually file a return with every state each month. Again, they handle it and you don’t have to worry.

Pros

  • Automates taxation codes for billing
  • Files taxes with each state on a monthly basis with very little work
  • Provides good reporting
  • User-friendly UI

Cons

  • Support and account management
  • Performance and down time
  • It saved me about half a day's work each month, as well as probably 2-3 days of work for the financial analyst per month.
  • Having nexus in only 4 states still required a lot of manual calculations each month, so saves many hours of work for the team each month.
Establishing the tax connector was a bit of trouble using QuickBooks, but was quite seamless with Zuora. A bit of troubleshooting for both but more problems on the QuickBooks side. Make sure your financial analyst and billing analyst are trained.
  • Zuora
  • QuickBooks
  • SalesForce
Pretty seamless, the tax engine connection process was smooth. Some problems here and there with QuickBooks.
It’s user-friendly, and is an automation software so by design it doesn’t require a lot of hands on interaction.
Yes we use Avalara for tax returns. This saves us several hours a month from having to log into the state websites and enter the amount of sales tax charged to each city and state. Absolutely worth it if you have nexus in more than 1-2 states.
  • Microsoft Office 365
We chose Avalara over Excel for manually calculating tax rates each month/quarter as well as for automatically calculating sales tax amounts per month.
It’s well suited when you need to charge sales tax, especially if you have a small finance department. They will take care of everything for you. It is not well suited if you do not charge sales tax or have nexus in just few states, or have a big accounting team where it’s no problem to manually calculate taxes for just a few states.

Comments

More Reviews of Avalara

  1. Home
  2. Tax Compliance Software
  3. Avalara Reviews
  4. User Review of Avalara