Item: Avalara
Rating: 9
Author: Jordan Keil

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We are using Avalara across our whole organization that includes three divisions. The biggest challenge to our organization is understanding which states tax their own state agencies to include for sales tax calculations. The remaining divisions of our business are B2C and very straight forward with tax calculations.

Pros and Cons

Avalara's tax tables are accurate and updated timely across all the states we have a Nexus in.
Avalara's customer service is top notch, the treatment of customers is far better than any other service-based business I've worked with in the past.
Avalara integrates with many third-party platforms we use throughout our company, i.e Sage & Shopify.

The response times from the implementation team was very slow. I understand this is a result of the rapid growth of the company, so knowing that, it did not create hard feelings.

Return on Investment

Avalara has freed up nearly 60 hours of my staff's time to perform other financial duties each month.
Avalara has significantly reduces our state sales tax return kickbacks for improper calculations.

Implementation Rating

The rating of a 6 was not because I was displeased with Avalara's service or implementation team. The implementation process and implementation team were great. The issue I had with implementation was finding the time of an implementation specialist to devote to our account. With the fast growth of Avalara, my specialist always felt rushed which made me feel I did not get adequate time or support.

Systems Integrated With

Shopify

Integration with Shopify was incredibly easy as they had it pre-built into Shopify's implementation process.

Usability

Avalara may seem confusing to use at first but it has an incredible help/resource tool that provides descriptive feedback to assist with understanding where to go and what to do in order to accomplish your task. This is the best part about being a new user of Avalara, avoiding calling a system representative constantly.

Additional Capabilities

We do not currently use any other services from Avalara other than the tax calculation platform.

Alternatives Considered

We actually did not dive into depth with any other companies. Avalara was the first we explored. We came to the Avalara conference last year and it blew us away so we decided on the spot to move forward with Avalara.

Likelihood to Recommend

My experience with Avalara has been great so far but I have only used it tailored to my company's manufacturing and distribution realm, to both B2B and B2C. Inside this realm, Avalara is able to track and capture accurate sales tax data across all 21 states we have Nexus in and provide us information timely to file our sales tax returns. Avalara also excels at differentiating between government customers and regular customers with the tax code exclusions it has set up for its customers.

Orange You Glad You Chose Avalara

Modules Used

Overall Satisfaction with Avalara