Item: Avalara
Rating: 9
Author: Verified User

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Avalara helps in a few ways. It report all our sales to various state agencies. Avalara also maintain state threshold reports for us. We utilize their API in our bookkeeping software to compute sales tax on all our sales too. Whenever we have a tricky issue, more often than not, they have a solution either by talking to an agent or their website's vast support library.

Pros and Cons

Tax calculation.
Reporting to various state agencies.
Tax support.

Everything seems to be an add-on (US based support, better tax support libraries)
Service/website/setup in general has a bit of a learning curve for non-tech people.
Not always easy to discuss billing issues. You have to schedule appointments most of the time.

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?

Yes

Did implementation of Avalara go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Avalara again?

Yes

Return on Investment

With immersion, Avalara's tools have been invaluable in our sales tax prep. It's not easy at first to utilize though.
Avalara makes sales tax reporting a breeze. It can tackle a task in about 5 minutes.

Systems Integrated With

Quickbooks Online
Stripe

Quickbooks was a bit quirky to set-up. Avalara was awesome in helping me integrate it, even bringing in an engineer to get it all squared away.

Usability

I have to log into the Avalara app before creating any invoices. If I don't, the sales tax isn't computed. Sometimes, I feel how information is organized on Avalara's site is too much. I wish they had simpler menus to navigate through different issues. It is as if each product has its own support section.

Additional Capabilities

Avalara Returns

Avalara keeps track of state tax thresholds for us, which is vital, especially as a SaaS company that does all its sales online and products are delivered via the cloud. It keeps the guess work of reporting out. All we have to do is do a quick review of our sales by the 10th of each month, click a button, and our sales are reported to various state agencies. It's super simple.

Likelihood to Recommend

I truly view Avalara as a tax leader, especially for cloud based SaaS companies like mine. While it was difficult to at first set up, their support team did an amazing job getting us up and running. With immersion, he product gets easier to use. They offer great webinars too, which provide great insights on how to maximize their products, as well as knowledge on new tax regulations. For being all about tax, their webinars are never boring, which is kinda nice.

Avalara is a Powerful Tool

Modules Used

Overall Satisfaction with Avalara