If Avalara Owns It-Try It!
April 21, 2022

If Avalara Owns It-Try It!

Kim Zulock | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Modules Used

  • AvaTax
  • ACU
  • TTR/ATR
  • Business License

Overall Satisfaction with Avalara

We use Avalara Consumer Use to manage our use tax obligations. Within the construction world, we do not have a lot of sales tax, but we have large consumer use obligations, and our ERP system was not adept at identifying the issues. We implemented ACU to save us time on researching every invoice that was hitting our system. We were able to reduce the time in half, thanks to the software. We use Avalara business licenses to manage our growing number of license renewals. Along with around 200 licenses for our base business, we have 7 subsidiaries that we are having to manage licenses for. Between business licenses and contractor licenses, this was becoming an overwhelming task for my small department. We had tried a competitor for about a year and they did a horrible job, so when the opportunity came to work with a company that I have been working with for years, I jumped at it. We were fans of TTR before Avalara purchased them. Their vast construction library was what really drew us in and we were working with them after having a really bad experience with another research product. Once Avalara purchased them, though the only thing I can say is that the service and product have gotten better! It is awesome to have a single company managing all of our tax needs.
  • Service
  • Knowledge
  • Integrity
  • There is a need for a centralized account manager across all products. We struggle with knowing who to speak to depending on which product we need help with.

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?

Yes

Did implementation of Avalara go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Avalara again?

Yes

  • It has cut our consumer use compliance time in half.
  • ATR is a great resource for us to find tax rates for our job sites. The ability to switch between address and coordinates has come in handy quite a few times.
  • The ATR research has been amazing! Especially the tax answers functionality. When your construction company frequently takes hunting trips and you have to figure out the taxability of one of those trips, it is amazing the amount of work they were able to use to find us the answer!
  • We use PENTA, but that is not an option for integration, so we just use uploads
We do not integrate the system with our software, it is all standalone.
I will admit to struggling a bit with ACU and Business Licenses. We could use a little more training on those products
  • Avalara Returns
  • CertCapture
I used Returns and CertCapture at my previous employer. We do not currently use any of these in my current role.
We used CSC for business licenses in the past and it was rough, we chose Avalara because we felt like they were a better option and that we could trust them.
In my previous job, we used Avalara for sales tax, and we struggled a little because of the type of customers we had. We manufactured large culverts, bridges, and other items that were used in construction, but were typically not delivered to addresses. This caused some issues when trying to track down the right taxing jurisdiction. If your company though, is a more typical business-to-business company, Avalara is definitely the right choice. The sheer number of taxing codes that they have the research behind is amazing and would definitely help you to ensure that you are in compliance. I would also recommend them if you are typically seeing high-dollar audits. Despite some of the issues with calculating with no address, at my prior company we went from regularly seeing 5-6 figure sales tax audits to zero dollar sales tax audits. Having them to help with the decisions and ensuring the rates were up to date really saved us money.

Avalara Feature Ratings

Sales and Use Taxes
8
Cross-border Taxes
Not Rated
VAT / GST Taxes
Not Rated
Energy and Fuel Taxes
Not Rated
Geolocation for Tax Assessment
Not Rated
3rd-Party Software Integrations
Not Rated
Tax Data Reporting
Not Rated
Compliance Administration Management
Not Rated
Tax Exemption Processing
Not Rated
Tax Document Management
Not Rated
Complex Tax Scenario Management
Not Rated