Item: Avalara
Rating: 9
Author: Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Avalara

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Avalara Avatax is being used in our business to correctly calculate sales tax on all sales made within states in which we have nexus. We also use the supplementary offerings from Avalara to manage our resale certificates and customer sales tax exemptions digitally, as well as Avalara's filing service. The problems addressed by this are that we never have to worry about incorrect calculation of sales taxes, our certificates are all stored digitally in one place in case of an audit, and our returns are filed correctly by a company with a lot of experience in doing so.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Good website with lots of tools & functionality.
Excellent integration with Netsuite.

Cons

Requires manually editing sales tax calculations in cases of discrepancies with e-commerce sales tax calculations.

Return on Investment

Drastically reduce the time required for sales tax calculations.
Elimination of need to file sales tax returns.

Usability

Fairly intuitive and easy to use web features once you learn them, and lots of data/reporting tools available.

Additional Capabilities

As mentioned in the prior questions, we use both the certificate management and the returns filing and both have saved the company time and money, and are very convenient.

Likelihood to Recommend

Avalara Avatax is well suited for businesses that sell nationally and want to be covered in case of an audit. It is especially ideal for businesses with locations across multiple states as it allows fairly easy and straightforward management of not only the sales tax calculations but also exemption paperwork for customers within these states.

Avalara Implementation

Implementation Rating

Integration with Netsuite was fairly quick and painless. One small downside is that updating the plugin on Netsuite requires manually clicking to update it; automatic updating would be nice.

Integrating Avalara

Ease of Integration

The setup process was fairly seamless and quick. The systems communicated back and forth well, though there was some requirement for double entry of certain transaction types, such as sales tax only refunds. This was utilizing Avalara's older legacy plugin for Netsuite, and not their newer SuiteTax plugin. Transactions then fed through for tax filing seamlessly.

Future Integration Plans

Netsuite
Netsuite Oneworld

Yes the vendors support this integration.

Types of Integration

API (e.g. SOAP or REST)

SuiteApps integration through Netsuite

Integration Lessons Learned

Ensure you take your time in the initial setup phase to properly tie everything in, code everything and test everything. If you have a large number of exempt customers they appear to offer managed certificates now, which is not something we were able to take advantage of during our time with the company.

Systems Integrated With

Netsuite
Custom Web-Store

Full integration for sales tax calculation on all sales. Also connected with the certificate management portion of Avatax (Avacerts), so exempt customers automatically don't get taxes charged once they're set up. The setup with Netsuite was fairly straightforward. The API portion was more complex and ultimately never got completed, though that was more on our end than Avalara's.

Comments

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Bobby Sands
(Vendor Representative) commented 4 years ago
Thank you for taking the time to write about your experience with Avalara, we're happy to hear it has been positive. We appreciate your feedback and look forward to continuing to serve you.

Avalara makes the complications of sales taxes a thing of the past!

Modules Used