Item: Avalara
Rating: 8
Author: Verified User

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Avalara to calculate our sales and seller's taxes on customer invoices and to file our sales tax returns in 15 states. This helps us to focus on our core business functions and leave the administration of tax rules and calculations to the professionals. We don't have to worry about not being compliant or having the wrong tax rate.

Pros and Cons

Portal is very helpful, detailed, and user friendly.
I love how I can generate a lot of different reports on sales and sales tax by state, etc.
Can reach assistance by phone whenever you have a question.

Better trained phone assistants - often I figure out a problem I've called after a while of waiting on hold while they check on it.
Need to be able to mark invoices to Canada as "customer's broker used" so they don't assess GST or HST on these ones. The broker has to collect it by law so it makes the customer get charged twice, which they don't like and refuse to pay us as well as their broker. So we have to process these ones without going through Avalara - kind of a pain.
Need to show the accrued amount on "tax details and adjustments" for any states where you have filing periods larger than one month. I have to go back in my records to see what the accrued taxes are for previous months to make sure that the tax amount listed is correct before I approve each month.

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?

Would you buy Avalara again?

Yes

Return on Investment

Helped us be compliant as we expand into more states.
Allows us to review/verify tax calculations monthly & be confident they are correct.
Had a better integration with Rootstock as opposed to Infor, which we now use as our ERP. Wish that the integration with Infor was the same.

Systems Integrated With

BigCommerce (ecommerce website)
Roostock/Financial Force
Infor

Infor is a lot less integrated and takes a lot more admin to do the same things as we did in Rootstock.

Usability

We have had a number of issues with the integration, but overall we are glad we have Avalara. Some of the things we have run into I have mentioned earlier in this survey, but are: not being able to exempt GST/HST on Canadian invoices for customers using their own broker, the "tax interface tax credit" in Infor not always matching the results in Avalara, no accrued taxes amount showing in the "tax details & adjustments" area, which I use for monthly reconciliation, not being able to have more than one type of exemption at the same time for the same customer, based on the product code.

Additional Capabilities

Avalara Returns

Yes, we have benefitted. It takes a lot of pressure off of our month-end processes and we have the peace of mind that they are being filed in a timely manner, and correctly. We don't use CertCapture because we don't feel it's worth the cost; we already have a storage system internally, built on Sharepoint.

Alternatives Considered

Avalara is the only product I have been involved with.

Likelihood to Recommend

I haven't used other sales tax service providers, so I can't compare it to others. However, I have found it to be extremely necessary as we grow and expand into other states so that we aren't spending all our time figuring out the complex tax laws, jurisdictions, rates, etc. for our customer sales. It gives us peace of mind that the correct taxes are being filed and we are compliant. There are definitely areas for improvement, but it's a great service.

Takes a load off our minds - especially at month-end!

Modules Used

Overall Satisfaction with Avalara