Item: Avalara
Rating: 10
Author: Verified User

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Avalara to calculate sales tax on our invoices to customers. We have 50+ US legal entities and have different set of nexus for each entity. As such, it is critical to use a software provider to assist with calculating the sales tax on the products we sell. Avalara fulfills those needs for us.

Pros and Cons

Correctly calculates sales tax
Informs us when we have approached or passed economic nexus in states we are not registered
provides the detail behind the calculations and provides charts that indicates what is taxable and what is not in various states.

As Avalara is connected to the invoicing system, it cannot be used for cash basis reporting
Would like to see it reference our system invoice names on the summary screens (currently have to click through to the transactional level to see it)

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?

I wasn't involved with the implementation phase

Would you buy Avalara again?

Yes

Return on Investment

It would be impossible to calculate the tax on all the various items we sell without Avalara.

Systems Integrated With

Netsuite
Stripe
Recurly
Zuora
Intacct

very easy to intergrate.

Usability

Sometimes difficult to find what invoice the transaction relates to.

Additional Capabilities

Professional Services (nexus studies, registrations, backfiling, etc.)

We have considered using Avalara Returns; however, it currently would cost more than if we do it ourselves. With using SST for free, it might be close. Have not considered using Cert Capture of Professional services items. Our business growth is done through acquisitions so not much needed to our legacy items to need these services.

Likelihood to Recommend

We had a situation where it appears sales tax was not being calculated correctly on a TN sale as the local jurisdiction did not have tax on the entire sale. However, that specific local jurisdiction has a max taxability and there is no way that I would have known about this without the use of Avalara. Given we just have to code the sale and then it determines taxability in all the various states, plus local jurisdictions, it would be impossible to handle the sales tax function without the use of a software like Avalara.

Avalara will get the job done

Modules Used

Overall Satisfaction with Avalara