Item: Avalara
Rating: 10
Author: Eddie Evans

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use the product to file state and federal tax returns. The business problem that it address for us, is to not make and support internal solutions and keep up with the EDI and form changes the states randomly makes.

Pros and Cons

Track changes, such as return data from month to month, or state-related changes, such as tax rates.
Easy to understand the logic to get transactions to the correct return.
Easy to get transactions into the system.
Easy to get data out of the system for ad-hoc reporting.

Some system enhancements / improvements seem to be based on programming ideas vs. user ease of use
Requesting help with a module can be lengthy and time consuming

Return on Investment

For us, the biggest time saver was updating and maintaining a home grown system
It also saves us about 40 man hours a month in reviewing and approving the accountant returns

Implementation Rating

They were able to understand our needs and provided a timeline that was acceptable and were able to keep.

Usability

The system is very user-friendly and easy to maintain. Depending on how your company is organized, some updates require IT to manage, for for the most part, the system can be managed by the end-users.

Likelihood to Recommend

For us, it was refreshing that the state tax returns scenarios came with "Standard Scenarios" which only need to be slightly modified to work with our data. They also assigned consultants, to help implement the system, who actually understand the state tax return requirements. This helped us think about ways to improve our process as we were setting up rules.

Avalara Excise Tax Solution

Modules Used

Overall Satisfaction with Avalara