We love AvaTax
January 22, 2018
We love AvaTax
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Modules Used
- AvaTax
Overall Satisfaction with Avalara AvaTax
We use AvaTax to automate the calculation of sales tax for all of our sales in both channels of our organization. We ship products throughout the United States; AvaTax makes it possible for us to charge the correct amount of sales tax on thousands of sales transactions across hundreds of tax jurisdictions.
- AvaTax is reliable. In the three years I have been using it, there has been only one system outage that affected one day of our sales transactions.
- AvaTax knows how to calculate the correct sales tax rate for states with specific origin, destination, and mixed sourcing rules such as California, Illinois, and Texas.
- The AvaTax reporting tool is easy to navigate and provides useful reports for tax return filing.
- In my experience, the AvaTax rate database is updated regularly, so we never have to worry about making sure AvaTax is keeping up with tax rate changes.
- AvaTax allows us to customize which taxing jurisdictions we want to "turn on" down to the most local level.
- AvaTax can be set up to charge sales tax or seller's/vendor's/retailer's use tax rates on a state-by-state basis.
- AvaTax uses the U.S. Postal Service address database to calculate tax rates for specific locations. Usually, this is extremely accurate. However, in the case of new construction projects without an established address, sometimes the tax calculator fails to locate the ship-to address. When this occurs, the tax calculator appears to default to the center of the zip code for the address provided, which can lead to an incorrect rate being used. This is an infrequent issue, and we are usually able to sort it out with our customers.
- AvaTax keeps on top of taxing jurisdiction rate changes. However, in the month when a new rate takes effect, the AvaTax report sometimes shows sales for that jurisdiction segregated into two lines. Total sales are correct, but we have to manually add the two lines together.
- Because our organization uses AvaTax, we do not have to spend time determining what the correct tax rate or tax dollar amount should be for any given sales transactions. When we enter our orders, sales tax is calculated and entered into our ERP system automatically. Our accounting department does not have to worry about updating a table of tax rates, and we know that the rate and tax amount will be correct.