Item: Avalara
Rating: 10
Author: Alejandro Castaneda

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Avalara is being used for sales tax calculation when selling products. Avalara streamlines the tax calculations by eliminating the need for our company to enter the tax level and percentages by state, city and county, an activity that can be time-consuming and prone-error. Also, Avalara provides excellent support when any issue arises between our ERP and Avalara.

Pros and Cons

Avalara maintains tax % level by county and even by city zone more accurate than we expected.
Avalara provides excellent customer support when questions arises.
Avalara Cert Captures streamlines the capture of customer tax certificates efficiently.

Avalara Customer Support sometimes takes 30 minutes to reply. I get they are too busy, but I normally send the Q and just get to do some other things in between.
Changes to the Websites are too drastically from the latest version to the previous one. A video explaining the changes would be handy for us, customers, to understand the changes.

Return on Investment

Avalara has simplified our sales tax process.
We spend less in house time on rates, our costs to have the CPA calculate the sales tax have been eliminated.

Systems Integrated With

Our ERP, Epicor 10, integrates with Avalara for Tax Calcualtions for Sales

Epicor 10, our ERP, integrated to Avalara was an easy process, since it was implemented by Epicor Consultants.

Usability

Avalara does what it does in the background. It is very easy to use once you understand how taxes are calculated, and the Ship to address are correctly entered in the ERP system.

Additional Capabilities

CertCapture

We only use CertCapture right now.

Alternatives Considered

We have use only Avalara so far.

Likelihood to Recommend

Avalara is well suited for Tax Calculation for USA. I wonder if Avalara is also available for all countries in the continent (Latin American countries). Our ERP does not have Geo Localization for tracking where our shipments are being shipped to. Most of our shipments are to fields, or a well in the middle of the country, where even the Avalara finds it hard to provide the correct tax percent correct sometimes.

Avalara Tax Review

Modules Used

Overall Satisfaction with Avalara