Item: Avalara
Rating: 10
Author: Andy Webber

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Avalara as our primary system to track and collect all Tax Exempt certifications that we get from our schools and school district partners. In addition, we also log every transaction that we make into Avalara in order to have automated returns created for us and sent to the IRS. This allows us to not have a dedicated Finance person on our staff.

Pros and Cons

Collects Tax Exempt certifications
Calculates tax on all purchases
Files our state and federal tax documents

It can be slow to load at times
UI changes fairly often
Recently ran into some bugs when inputting certificates

Key Insights

Do you think Avalara delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Avalara's feature set?

Yes

Did Avalara live up to sales and marketing promises?

I wasn't involved with the selection/purchase process

Did implementation of Avalara go as expected?

I wasn't involved with the implementation phase

Would you buy Avalara again?

Yes

Return on Investment

Our operations associate can manage our tax info (lower cost employee)
Salespeople don't need to think about adding tax, it calculates for them
We are yet to be audited because our filings are correct

Systems Integrated With

To be honest, we currently use Avalara as a standalone platform and it is not currently integrated with any of our other platforms or tech that we use. Even without any integrations, Avalara has proven itself to be a phenomenal tool and an easy investment decision to make.

Usability

I give Avalara a rating of 10 because of how easy it has been to train various, lower level employees to use the platform with fidelity. Even in my own training as an Account Executive who is responsible for calculating taxes on new deals, I was able to pick up the Avalara platform fairly quickly because of how easy and intuitive it is to use.

Additional Capabilities

Avalara Returns

As far as I know, we currently only use Avalara's AvaTax feature, which is able to meet all of our small business needs in terms of managing tax exempt certificates from our school and district partners, automatically calculating tax on all new deals that are inputted into the system, and for auto generating tax return paperwork for our team.

Likelihood to Recommend

Avalara is well suited for any small or medium business that wants their employees to focus on the actual job at hand instead of getting bogged down tracking who has what tax exemption and how that factors into our pricing to determine if we charge tax on each deal. I can't think of any situation where Avalara is not well suited.

Simple and Efficient Tax Solution

Modules Used

Overall Satisfaction with Avalara