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Avalara - a top tier sales tax automation software
April 28, 2020

Avalara - a top tier sales tax automation software

Marcus Warolin | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Avalara

We are an ecommerce company and we have integrated Avalara Avatax into 2 of our websites. We are also an Amazon FBA seller and we load all Amazon sales into Avalara in order make use of the Avalara tax filing service. Being e commerce, we have nexus accross the US and I have no doubt that we would not be able to keep up with sales tax requirements without Avalara.
  • We have had great success with the Avalara plug ins to our websites.
  • The tax filing service is easy and convienent
  • We have recently moved to their SST services which will help save cost.
  • The lack of integration with Amazon causes the greatest frustration for us. We end up having to import sales into Avalara on a monthly basis to make sure our tax reporting is complete.
  • Avalara is one of the more expensive solutions, but at this same time, they are the only provider that has had the range of plugins for the applications we use.
  • We have added more than 3 dozen states in which we have Nexus over the prior couple of years and have not had to increase our staff at all to help meet the added filing requirements.
  • Magento
  • NetSuite
  • Shopify
  • WooCommerce
Avalara is built into Shopify, so that was a very easy connector. Other connectors were still very simple. Download the plug in and enter your credentials and that is about it.
Avalara is very easy to use. Their site makes it easy to see your transactions and how much tax to each state you owe. I do always have difficulty finding the area on their site to make changes to states. Also I find their custom reports a bit of a challenge to use on their site.
  • Avalara Returns
  • CertCapture
We have greatly benefited from Avalara Returns. We have a small office and having to prepare returns for all the states we have nexus in would require a significant amount of time. For CertCapture, we were able to get in compliance with our resale certificate management practices and with the tools to let us know and automate requests to customers, we are able to stay in compliance.
We have looked at TaxJar as an alternative to Avalara. TaxJar is significantly less expensive than Avalara, but what we ran into during our evaluation was TaxJar did not have the needed connectors with NetSuite/SuiteCommerce. Also since Shopify is natively connected to Avalara, TaxJar was not able to connect with Shopify, but would have to have orders exported to NetSuite to be run by TaxJar after the customer had been charged tax in Shopify based on the Avalara calculations.
We have found Avalara to be very well suited for ecommerce. With the available connectors, we can set up the connections once and they then run extremely reliably. We have recently moved to using Avalara's SST services, which will help save a significant amount of money.

Avalara Feature Ratings

Type of tax
10.0
Sales and Use Taxes
10
Cross-border Taxes
Not Rated
VAT / GST Taxes
Not Rated
Energy and Fuel Taxes
Not Rated
Tax Reporting & Compliance
8.0
Geolocation for Tax Assessment
10
3rd-Party Software Integrations
8
Tax Data Reporting
9
Compliance Administration Management
Not Rated
Tax Exemption Processing
7
Tax Document Management
6
Complex Tax Scenario Management
Not Rated

Avalara Implementation

We had no problem implementing the plug in for avalara with out the help of outside IT services.