Item: Avalara
Rating: 7
Author: Verified User

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Avalara to track our sales tax eligible sales and calculating the correct amount of sales tax that should be charged and remitted to the states. We also utilize Avalara's involvement in the Streamlined Sales Tax process as a filer. Lastly, we take advantage of Avalara's research and other state tax information to assist us in our day to day operations.

Pros and Cons

Calculate Sales Tax
File SST returns
Research

UI is not very intuitive
Reports are not customizable
Hard to find features without googling them

Return on Investment

Has made our lives easier
Ability to spend time on more impactful areas of our business
Productivity has risen

Systems Integrated With

Excel
Adobe
Microsoft Office products

They appear to work fine with those products above.

Usability

Avalara provides a good service and does what we ask of it in tracking sales tax rates and calculating sales tax to collect and remit. Unfortunately, Avalara doesn't do a good job of customizing the reports they produce or taking the next step in making the UI more user-friendly and making all the features available through your profile instead of hiding them via different Avalara websites - Avalara vs Avatax. It's useable for sales tax but some tweaks would make it useable at a higher level and more applicable to larger entities or entities dealing with more data than us.

Additional Capabilities

Avalara Returns

We have benefited from using Avalara to file our Streamlined Sales Tax returns and that has cut our normal filing time in half. Sales tax is what Avalara, in our experience, excels at and that's what we ask them to do and what we expect out them. So, having that help has been great for us and our productivity.

Key Insights

Do you think Avalara delivers good value for the price?

Not sure

Are you happy with Avalara's feature set?

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

Likelihood to Recommend

Any company or entity or person that sells goods or provides services that may or may not be eligible for sales tax could easily utilize Avalara. Multi-State entities could also use Avalara simply because Avalara maintains the tax rates not just at the state level but the municipal and special jurisdictions which most people would find difficult or impossible to track accurately over time.

Avalara Review

Overall Satisfaction with Avalara