Useful Technology, but Some Support Issues
May 09, 2019
Useful Technology, but Some Support Issues
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Modules Used
- AvaTax
Overall Satisfaction with Avalara
We implemented Avalara in order to automate the calculation and filing of sales tax on our product. It is currently only being used by the Finance team (Accounting). It has helped us to streamline the filing of our sales tax returns, and to ensure that tax is accurately reflected on all outgoing invoices, virtually eliminating the need to separately attempt to collect tax from our customers and protecting us from negative audit findings.
- Integration with ERP is seamless and easy to set up for the calculation on our invoices.
- Filing review is simple. It's easy to tie to our ERP system and to sign off on a monthly basis. Automatic acceptance is useful for states where we have $0 filings.
- Setting up sales tax exemptions is cumbersome and requires double work, as the customer's exemption information needs to be configured in both our ERP and in AvaTax (we do not license CertCapture, which I believe might mitigate some of those issues).
- Support from our account team is sometimes severely lacking. Responses can be extremely delayed, and we were at one point told that they would not complete an evaluation required by our internal information security team because we do not meet a minimum amount of spend with Avalara on an annual basis.
- We've been able to manage our Sales Tax compliance with a fairly small team, and have not needed to add additional staff in order to address our rapidly growing customer base, even as we've added new geographies.
- We've been able to complete audits much more quickly due to the information stored in AvaTax.
- FinancialForce
- NetSuite
Both integrations are OOTB and were very easy to set up once we were able to get the information on how to do so from our account team.
We have been working with managed returns filing and it is extremely useful. It cuts down the work that we would need to do at the end of the month to keep on top of our tax filings by almost 90% since it pulls in transactions from our ERP. It is probably less complex with CertCapture, but exemption certificate management with AvaTax only is a bit manual and requires you to enter information in both your ERP and AvaTax.