Fuel distributor uses Avalara to calculate Excise Taxes with SAP and file returns
May 11, 2019
Fuel distributor uses Avalara to calculate Excise Taxes with SAP and file returns

Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Modules Used
- Returns
- Excise
Overall Satisfaction with Avalara
We use AvaTax Excise to calculate taxes for our fuel business. Tax calls are made from our ERP to Avalara and taxes are returned for billing and purchasing. It is managed by the tax department. It is our solution for tax calculation. We use Avalara Returns to calculate the motor fuel tax returns to report to the states for where we sell fuel.
Pros
- Visibility of the rules that apply to the transactions.
- Reliable connection for the tax calls and cloud application.
- The ability to customize the program for specific customer/vendor issues you may have.
Cons
- The customer service process takes a while to respond, sometimes more than a day for non-critical issues.
- There's a bit of a learning curve to understand the Scenarios and Profiles that drive the rules and how they interact.
- I would like to see more sales tax functionality in the AvaTax Excise. It has the basic calculations for motor fuel, but I want to use for other product lines.
- We haven't seen a lot of time savings yet, but we concurrently did an ERP implementation, so there were more accounting and billing problems that resulted in more work on the returns. This isn't due to Avalara though. We are working through amended returns to fix all these past situations.
- The configuration we have is good for preparing the returns and getting them out the door, but we still do some things manually that I plan on automating with rules in Avalara in the future. I expect that when these are implemented, we will have time savings on return preparation.
- The main time drain is on general ledger account reconciliations. When Avalara did our implementation, they showed us a reconciliation method and which Avalara reports work best for that process. It really helped the tax department in the transition and is still used today.
- SAP
It makes a tax call to return taxes on every transaction if needed. We used a connector mapped to Avalara. There were some customizations we needed to make in SAP to handle the taxes. Examples were to adjust the pricing procedure to record the Avalara taxes as pricing conditions, deferred tax invoicing, and accounting for deferred taxes. It was moderately difficult, as our SAP implementation consultants were not familiar with Avalara and were not recording the taxes as "taxes" in SAP, but Pricing Conditions caused different accounting postings that had to be resolved.
We have not used this, but are currently looking into exemption Certificate management.
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