Avalara saved my sanity!!
November 07, 2022

Avalara saved my sanity!!

Charity Rees | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Modules Used

  • AvaTax
  • Returns

Overall Satisfaction with Avalara

We are a network marketing company that sales to wholesale distributors through out all of North America. We use both Avatax and Avalara Returns to ensure we are collecting and remitting the correct sales/sellers taxes in all states and provinces. The biggest issue our company was facing when we moved to Avalara was two-fold; the ability to apply multiple tax rates in the markets we are in, and the time it took to file the returns each month. With Avatax we are now taxing products as they should be in every market, right down to the local tax rates in different states. The time it takes to file returns has been cut down from a full 40 hour week, to a mere 4 to 6 hours a week, dependent upon if it is quarterly filings, etc.
  • Calculating taxes down to the local levels
  • Remitting tax returns in a timely manner
  • Responding to tax questions in a timely manner
  • Reporting issues with their platform and updating as they make corrections to ensure uninterrupted use of their product.
  • Ensuring tax rates are updated and locales change them
  • I really have no complaints about the product at this time.
  • It works very well for our company and size of business.

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

  • We went from a full 40-60 hours to process tax returns to 4-6 hours
  • Tax audits have gone down from 3 a year to 1 maybe every 3 years
  • Audits that we have had have come back with minimal errors or zero change.
  • Website sales
  • Network POS system (Datatrax)
The process was very smooth with our POS system and ecommerce as they are linked. It was actually our POS provider that recommended Avalara for the integration and we are so happy that they did.
I was able to master the use of the website and reports fairly quickly. The interface is very user friendly and if you get hung up an issue, their customer service is very knowledgeable and helpful. I took a couple of classes that they offered for additional training and found their trainers to be an excellent source of assistance. They were able to address several different scenarios from the different types of companies represented at the training to every ones satisfaction.
  • Avalara Returns
As mentioned prior, the time it would take to file the returns every month was overwhelming. Add on the headache of not being sure if we were compliant in all the little locales was very stressful. Now Avalara tells us when we have sold in a new area that we may need to register in and offers assistance in getting registered there.
When I started with the company, they were using a version of CCH. This was my first experience with that program and I found it very cumbersome. It was unable to calculate multiple tax rates (this may have changed in the last 10 years) and while it filled out some of the tax returns for us, we still had to manipulate many and file them ourselves. Now we just verify that what we show in our system matches Avalara and hit approve and we are done for another month.
If you are doing any kind of sales, Avalara is the platform to use. As a company we have sales in all 50 states and most of the Canadian provinces. We sale food and personal care items via a website, phone calls, and fax (yes, we still have customers using fax). The accuracy of the taxing each product properly is a great help to our company.

The only scenario I can see that would not benefit from Avalara is a small, local company, who only sales to one market and has a limited inventory.

Avalara Feature Ratings

Sales and Use Taxes
10
Cross-border Taxes
10
VAT / GST Taxes
10
Energy and Fuel Taxes
Not Rated
Geolocation for Tax Assessment
10
3rd-Party Software Integrations
10
Tax Data Reporting
10
Compliance Administration Management
10
Tax Exemption Processing
10
Tax Document Management
10
Complex Tax Scenario Management
10