Item: Avalara
Rating: 8
Author: Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Avalara

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

I work in the corporate office, where we handle sales and use tax for over 50 different companies. We utilize Avalara for tax calculations and storing exemption certificates for all of our business units. Each business unit has unique circumstances when it comes to taxation, and we have been able to set up custom rules for each one. This enables us to calculate accurate tax amounts on all our invoices.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Exemption certificate storage.
Pulling Tax Rates.
Compiling Research.

Cons

ECM autofill can be much slower than CertCapture.
ECM autofill sometimes puts the wrong region then won't let you change it manually.
There are occasionally duplicated/missing invoices in the sales tax data.

Return on Investment

Reduced time calculating tax rates. Many of our businesses were manually calculating their tax rates, which took up so much time that they were unable to scale.
Reduces the number of staff required. Each tax accountant can handle many business units at one time.
It has allowed us to streamline all of our processes. With all exemption certificates and sales data in one place, we have been able to create a standardized compliance method for all business units. This frees up the tax accountants to work on other tasks.

Systems Integrated With

Quickbooks
Made to Manage.
AX12

I did not do the integrations, so I do not have valuable insight.

Usability

The site generally works well and is easy to understand. Most features are logically named and categorized, making navigation of the site easy. Each of our business units regularly utilizes ECM and CertCapture, and we rarely encounter issues, even when training new staff. When I have issues, support can usually help fix them. The new live chat feature has been great for troubleshooting issues.

Additional Capabilities

We use Avalara for exemption certificate management, and we are currently on CertCapture and ECM. This has had a significant impact on our business by reducing the time it takes to process and approve exemption certificates. We have been using ECM's autofill feature, which is particularly helpful when it comes to multijurisdictional exemption certificates.

Certcapture is great for storing exemption certificates and ensuring we are only removing tax when allowed.

Alternatives Considered

I don't have experience with any similar products.

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

Other Software Used

Vertex

Likelihood to Recommend

I find Avalara well-suited in the majority of situations when it comes to tax calculation. The only issues we run into are with more complex tax situations. It may be less appropriate for invoices that have significant variability that affects taxability. For example, if there is a business that sometimes is an installer and other times is not, there may need to be different tax codes set up for each situation. This requires the users to know how tax needs to be charged in different situations, rather than having Avalara do this automatically.

Avalara Feature Ratings

Comments

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Celina Romera
(Vendor Representative) commented 6 days ago
Thanks for the review! We're glad to be helping your team manage exemption certificates across so many business units. We appreciate you flagging a few quirks with autofill and reporting. That kind of feedback helps us keep making the experience even better.

Avalara Review.

Modules Used