Item: Avalara
Rating: 2
Author: Todd Knowlton

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Avalara Avatax to collect and remit sales tax. We sell to customer nationwide so we have economic nexus in states other than our own. We have an subscription to their Tax Research product as well.

Pros and Cons

The integration with QuickBooks online works well.
The automated filing of reports is convenient.

Their software is very poor. It is obvious that they have acquired multiple companies and services and cobbled them together in a way that makes very little sense to the user. There is no real central starting point that will allow you to access all of the various features and services. We regularly encounter website failures and login failures and messages saying it can't do something right now. It is very frustrating.
We were oversold services that we didn't need and advised to register in states that we didn't need to register. We actually had a state call us and ask us to please not register because we would be filing zero dollar returns forever. But Avalara insisted that the "most compliant" thing to do was to register. We ended up deregistering in multiple states.
The biggest issue is customer service. The front line support when you open tickets rarely has the competence to understand your issue or problem. And the response times can be very slow. We have had two account managers and both were not very responsive. We had some really big issues that finally got escalated to their Customer Excellence team after we left a negative review online. But then that issue got all the way to being promised a resolution from management the next day and then they disappeared. We have been trying to get another response on that issue for an entire month and can't even get a reply. Which is why I'm trying another public review since that seems to be the only thing that gets their attention.

Return on Investment

So far they have cost us many hours because of the shortcomings of their software and customer support. At this point, we are still in the negative ROI. If we can get the kinks worked out, the ROI should be there due to the time it saves us filing returns. Their QuickBooks integration works well. If that didn't work well, we would have already abandoned them.

Systems Integrated With

QuickBooks Online

The QuickBooks Online integration was easy and works consistently well.

Usability

The features and tools are very disjointed. It is obvious that they have grown a lot of it through acquisition and then did a poor job of integrating the systems. The UX is very poor. Navigation is confusing. You can't get to some features without knowing a separate URL. And we regularly receive error messages and login failures that are obviously backend software issues.

Additional Capabilities

Avalara Returns

We signed up for the Tax Research tool. It had limited benefit for us.

Key Insights

Do you think Avalara delivers good value for the price?

Not sure

Are you happy with Avalara's feature set?

Yes

Did Avalara live up to sales and marketing promises?

Did implementation of Avalara go as expected?

Would you buy Avalara again?

Likelihood to Recommend

The best I can do is a two. Our experience has been so bad, the software is not good in lots of respects, and the customer service people are either too overwhelmed with people with issues that they can't respond or they just don't care to respond. And the services come at a premium price. So you would think we could at least get a response.

I know Avalara has real tax expertise deep inside that company. But the tools and processes they have cobbled together to monetize that expertise are not delivering a good experience. And their customer support is literally the worst I have ever experienced--and particularly coming from a premium provider.

So much potential and such disappointing customer experience

Modules Used

Overall Satisfaction with Avalara