Avalara Is Great At Calcuation And Filing Gets A Bit Iffy Outside Of That
June 18, 2025
Avalara Is Great At Calcuation And Filing Gets A Bit Iffy Outside Of That
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Modules Used
- AvaTax
- Returns
Overall Satisfaction with Avalara
Our company uses Avalara to calculate the sales tax on all of our quotes and invoices. Avalara retains all of our transaction information and we use Avalara to file all of our state sales tax returns. This helps keep things streamlined and avoids mistakes, as all of our data is in one place. We use Avalara to take the compliance load of the tax setup and calculation and all of the tax filings off of our company's plate. When done manually this was very time and labor consuming.
Pros
- Tax Calculation
- Tax Filing
- Retaining Transactions
Cons
- Avalara's State Registrations option is pretty expensive and should be quicker and cheaper
- Avalara's State Filing Setup is not coordinated with their State Registrations, so you still have to set up manually what they just registered for you.
- Even if Avalara has all of your data, they won't set up a state filing if you miss a deadline of the 20th of the current month they won't file that month, even though they have all of the transactions. (This could happen when a new state is selected for tax calculation but the state registration hasn't been completed yet.) They should allow you to set up the returns by the first of the month it is filed in at the least.
- Avalara's extractor is very base and limited; it can't extract multiple lines into Avalara, it takes an entire invoice and inputs it as one line. We were told after frequent calls that it works that way by design. Those out there who file returns on a regular basis can identify the problem with this scenario and why this won't work for tax filing.
- It is easy to use Avalara to calculate sales taxes for more precise and accurate tax collection, which saves our company oversight time and money. There is nothing more embarrassing than having a customer call during their sales tax audit and tell you that the auditor is saying they weren't taxed properly; with Avalara this is not a problem we need to worry about.
- Having Avalara file our state tax returns saves countless hours of labor and avoids mistakes; when this was performed manually in house it took weeks every month of preparation and filing for all of the states.
- Having Avalara do the calculations and using them to file state returns saves our company a lot of work duplication and reduces the chance of errors, which saves both manhours and potential penalties and fees.
- Connectwise PSA
- Kaseya autotask
- NetSuite
- QuickBooks
It was extremely simple to use Avalara with QuickBooks, although that was done only briefly. We set up Avalara with Connectwise PSA and that also was very simple; you must give your items an Avalara tax code, but that's a one-and-done and after that, it worked seamlessly. Avalara doesn't work at all with Kaseya autotask, and Kaseya is not helpful at all with their support. We tried using Avalara's extractor with NetSuite, and that has not performed accurately and has eaten up a lot of manhours. We are working on a full integration of Avalara and NetSuite, and hopefully that will work well.
- Avalara Returns
We use Avalara Returns to integrate seamlessly with Avalara's AvaTax, and this is very efficient and cost effective. We have found that the "backfiling" service is so expensive it isn't even worth looking at - I was once quoted $1500 per return for a backfiling with the complete data already in their system.
TaxJar is integrated with Kaseya autotask, and this integration is very inefficient and was not easy to set up. Neither TaxJar nor Kaseya support was helpful at all, "rude" is the only word to describe that, whereas Avalara has always tried to be helpful and has been very friendly to work with. TaxJar has no similar capability to retain their tax-calculated transactions and file the returns; TaxJar would calculate the taxes in Kaseya autotask and you would still have to manually import the data into TaxJar if you wanted to subscribe and have them file your returns. Needless to say that was a non-starter.
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
Comments
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