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Honest Opinions from an Indirect Tax Professional
May 17, 2019

Honest Opinions from an Indirect Tax Professional

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 5 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Modules Used

  • AvaTax

Overall Satisfaction with Avalara

The business is using Avalara for tax calculation for ecommerce sales, and as the integrated tax engine for our point of sales system. Finance is using it for tax and accounting data. It technically is used by IT users for various tasks that I'm not qualified to speak to. It addresses the need for a tax software that goes to a zip+4 or rooftop level tax calculation.
  • Tax calculations with the Avalara AvaTax API system returns pretty accurate taxation results.
  • AvaTax website is easy to navigate.
  • Avalara's blog provides valuable tax information regarding rate changes and tax holidays or changing tax rules.
  • When paired with our POS system, which does not utilize an API but utilizes an Avalara-designed static rate file, tax results are often inaccurate, resulting at times in significant tax undercollection.
  • Reports are hard to use when the same data is on multiple lines for multiple jurisdictions.
  • Website often is slow in looking up transaction details.
  • Customer support on the product/technical side leaves much to be desired. Poor communication, unresolved issues but tickets are closed anyway, and often, unhelpful "contact your rep" or "we don't support that" types of answers.
  • Paired with our new POS system, the Avalara static rate file has had issues that have caused us to report in over $10K more in taxes due than collected in under a year.
  • Filing of returns has been more complicated, as a good training of how the reports flow as compared to our general ledger data was not ever given.
I think Avalara has great data within the system for tax tools (rate lookups, transaction lookups, testing within a sandbox environment, etc.), but I feel the training to use it is inadequate. Training is even necessary to interpret the reports, in my opinion. When the new AvaTax update came out, no user information was provided regarding changes made, or even that I was being switched over to it. It would've been helpful to have a summary document or "release notes" to know what changes were made so I could've proactively determined how it impacted my review process compared to the old system. I appreciate that Avatax can generate the reports in multiple formats, and the format is aesthetically pleasing. Most of my displeasure with usability relates to the customer service side of the product (unanswered or unsatisfactorily unresolved tickets) and the inadequate/incorrect pairings of rate files between the point of sale system and Avatax.
We have not utilized those services. The managed returns service would not work for our company as the time period to review data for return completion and funding of the account is inadequate for as many returns as we need to review each month. We prefer a turnkey returns service that gives us the time necessary to do so and allows us to retain control over our review and filing processes.
Truthfully, it came down to the quoted cost/contracts/implementation costs, and that our point of sale system claimed it had done integrations with Avalara in the past and not with the other firms we were considering. I was not actually a part of the discussion and decision process in vendor selection.
I think if you're a smaller to mid-size business, or any size of business using Avalara for a tax calculation with a live API, it works well. I think when you're a larger company integrating with a point of sale system, and not using an API for tax determination, you can expect problems and can expect the organization will not be able to solve those timely for you, as it's hard to determine ownership of the issue between multiple players.

Avalara Feature Ratings

Type of tax
6.0
Sales and Use Taxes
6
Cross-border Taxes
Not Rated
VAT / GST Taxes
Not Rated
Energy and Fuel Taxes
Not Rated
Tax Reporting & Compliance
4.2
Geolocation for Tax Assessment
8
3rd-Party Software Integrations
3
Tax Data Reporting
4
Compliance Administration Management
4
Tax Exemption Processing
Not Rated
Tax Document Management
Not Rated
Complex Tax Scenario Management
2

Avalara Implementation

Thorough testing is necessary. Choose your most complicated tax jurisdictions for accuracy before going live, especially if paired with another vendor's point of sales system. Allow enough time for this, and probably allow about double the amount of time you think you need.

Integrating Avalara

  • Aptos
I'm not a member of the IT team which was involved with integration, so I don't feel at liberty to elaborate. I believe it was a complicated integration, however.