Avalara or not to Avalara, That Should Not Even Be A Question!
April 14, 2021
Avalara or not to Avalara, That Should Not Even Be A Question!
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Modules Used
- AvaTax
- CertCapture
Overall Satisfaction with Avalara
After the State of South Dakota vs Wayfair Supreme Court decision, we had no idea how we would be able to change our established software to collect sales tax. In researching this problem we found it was seriously more complicated that we ever imagined. We have a company that we contract with that takes care of our unclaimed property (which is another nightmare in and of itself) so I started looking for such a company that could help us with sales tax. We initially looked at Sovos but came to the conclusion that they were more geared for a larger company. One of my friends who works for the National Arbor Day Foundation told us about Avalara. It was a perfect fit. We use both Avatax and Certcapture in our business as a distributor of religious resources to members and entities of the Seventh-day Adventist Church.
- Our system meshes with their AVI seamlessly.
- Using Avatax, we can give our customers a total order quote when they place an order.
- Avalara's webinars have been especially helpful.
- In the beginning our programmer wished to speak directly with a programmer at Avalara so he could have some specific questions answered. Instead he was referred to a forum where he had to post his questions. This delayed our implementation of Avatax.
- I'm not sure if there is help available to assist in learning how to reconcile sales tax returns or not. We basically had to figure out how to do that ourselves.
- Without Avalara we would have needed to hire a full time person just to keep up with the ever changing state tax laws.
- It's really hard to say what the impact of Avalara has been as we have been substantially affected by the Covid-19 pandemic.
- AvaTax and CertCapture have been integrated with the shopping cart software on our website, which is in turn integrated with our accounting system.
Since our shopping cart for our website was custom written for us exclusively, we ran into a couple snags while integrating AvaTax and CertCapture. We got everything figured out and now everything seems to be working seamlessly,.
- CertCapture
We do business with churches and other religious entities that, in most states, are tax exempt. In other states some products sold to churches and other religious organizations are tax exempt and others are not. We use CertCapture to help us keep track of these types of transactions. We also use Avalara's managed returns and filing. It makes it so much easier if they file our returns for us. All we need to do is reconcile the total return amounts to our records by the 10th of every month.
- Sovos Intelligent Compliance Cloud (formerly Sovos S1 Platform)
We looked at Sovos pretty hard but came to the conclusion that they are geared for larger companies and were very expensive. When we contacted Avalara, their software and price structure seems to be in line with what we were looking for so we went with them, a decision I do not regret.