Mediocre at best

TERRIBLE and SLOW customer service. In fact, the worst I've ever experienced. It takes over a week to get a response unless you call-in, wait over an hour and get lucky with a knowledgeable rep. They love to pass the buck and point you to Avarala Help articles that are unrelated or not particularly useful.

Implementation - We went with their "guided implementation" to cut costs as we have a strong IT team and a lot of great internal and experienced resources. They were not helpful at all. No engagement (we had to reach out to them multiple times to get things moving), no project plan, limited guidance, slow responses and flat-out wrong recommendations. They gave us incorrect configuration information, and their data upload is downright antiquated. We had to CSV upload our customers (oh yeah, they don't know how to bulk upload data). We figured out a way to do it, but they also don't tell you any null values will delete those fields of data, so you get to do it all over again.

We then had to manually associate every single certificate for existing customers. We had to go through 3 reps and implementation types to properly handle marketplace facilitators (hint: setup an exempt customers in CertCapture like Amazon FBA/FBM, flow marketplace transactions through those customers, then create tax exemptions for each state that marketplace collects/remits on your behalf). We went live with lots of issues, and we're still working through several of them months later.

Their NetSuite integration is okay - but weak at best. Not intuitive at all. Permissions are a headache and we had to open a ticket to request they actually connect CertCapture correctly. All state liabilities also post to a single tax GL. If you want to report by state this is a challenge to reclass and reconcile.

Their reporting is mediocre at best . The reports they provide don't actually provide enough data to file your reports, likely because they want you to utilize their services and pay the $50/per filing for them to file on your behalf. If you have budget and you're not a small business, this would probably be fine.

UI - their User Interface is really pretty antiquated and frustrating to work with. Instead of having a single place to login and manage your account, there's an AvaTax login, there's an Avalara Admin login, there's a CertCapture login, and you have to handle them all separately. Many aspects just aren't super intuitive, and their Help isn't all that helpful. For instance, you can create a template cover letter to email to customers for exemption certificate requests, but you can't set it as a default form - unless you delete their default form and rename it (it took them 2 weeks to figure that one out).