Item: Avalara
Rating: 10
Author: Verified User

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Avalara has provided excellent service in helping us setup each state we have nexus in for sales and use tax. Since the time of getting are accounts setup with each state, we now use Avalara for calculating sales and use tax, housing exemption certificates, and filing returns. The calculating sales and use tax is amazing, we do not have to worry about whether or not we have received and are collecting sales tax based on the most recent updates from each state. Avalara has incorporated into their system the ease of handling these tax updates for each state. Certcapture, which helps with the exemption certificates, works great and seemless with Avatax and helps us manage all of our exemption certificates, let's us know when we need to collect new certificates from our customers, and determines whether or not the customer reason of exemption is valid for each state.

We have sales all around North America and managing each state would require many employees to stay on top of managing sales tax in each state. We are able to have two employees that use only maybe 20 percent of their time in managing all of our transactions in Avalara.

Pros and Cons

Calculating Sales Tax Precisely based on the Sales Transaction Data
Applying Exemption Certificates to transactions accurately
State filings completed accurately and timely and will resolve any issues with the state for any filing.
Sales Tax can be very tricky when you have a variety of product that is sold in any given state. The exact same item may be taxed in one state and not in another. We have identified the tax codes associated with each product and Avalara tax software will handle the rest on being able to determine whether the item should be taxed or not in any given state.

The search tool in the transactions does not work great. Once you review a transaction, the search critera is deleted and your results are removed causing you to enter the search critera in the fields again. This can be annoying when you are trying to review multiple transactions in the same search results.
Live metrics where we can see how much we have consumed of Avalara services based on our contract.
Being able to create custom reports. This would make some reports easier to navigate through only the information that I'm needing at that moment and not having it buried with all of the other data in the report.

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?

I wasn't involved with the implementation phase

Would you buy Avalara again?

Yes

Return on Investment

Avalara has been a huge impact once we realized all the areas we would be impacted by having an e-commerce presence.
We have not had to hire additional staff to stay compliant with 40 plus states we file with on any given basis.
We spend hardly anytime calculating rates, Avalara is accurate as long as we have our tax codes for our products loaded and the information provided to Avalara is accurate.
We review each month the data we are approving for Avalara to file our returns with and other than that we don't spend a whole lot of time in filing tax returns.

Systems Integrated With

ERP Software
Ecommerce
Shopify

I was not part of the integration of these softwares but I know we had a third party help us and create a connection between our ERP and Avalara. The integration to my understanding for both our ERP and Shopify was more just time consuming in making sure everything was correct in setting it up than it being difficult. I have never been told by those in our IT department that doing these integrations were to difficult.

Usability

The software and addons that we use are very applicable to our operations and the usability of the sotware works great with all of the software we have it integrated with. The certcapture and avatax work great together and has made things very automated for our company as majority of our sales are sales exempt. Navigating through the software is very user friendly and helps when we have to have other individuals go in as it is not difficult for them to find where they need to go within the software.

Additional Capabilities

Avalara Returns
CertCapture

We have benefited from these additional capablities as it has limited the amount of time we spend on filing returns and has made it easy for us to store exemption certificates. CertCapture works great with Avatax and makes nice to know that the exemption certificate will be applied to the correct customers and transactions on any givne basis especially since majority of our transactions our exempt from sales tax.

Likelihood to Recommend

It's hard to pick certain experiences because each month we have used Avalara it has provided a great experience and has been well suited for us. We have only one individual that reviews the sales and use tax on a monthly basis to ensure everything is ready to be filed and nothing seems out of the normal. If we did not have this software, this step alone would be extermely time consuming and even may require two people if not one.

One experience that sticks out is we had a filing with a state where the state had come back to us and said our filing was incorrect and that we owed a large sum to them for that month being reported. Avalara was aware of the situation and took care of it quickly. I never had to worry once I knew that one of Avalara tax professionals was assisting in the matter. It was nice to know we could focus on other things within our company while knowing Avalara had this handled.

I do not have a scenario where it is less appropriate because we purchased everything that is well suited for our company.

Using Avalara Software has been Great for our Company

Modules Used

Overall Satisfaction with Avalara