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.
- 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.