Avalara AvaTax connects to the software that businesses already have and delivers sales tax decisions based on precise geo-location in more than 12,000 taxing jurisdictions in the U.S.
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Bloomberg Tax
Score 9.0 out of 10
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Bloomberg Tax is a tax management and automation software suite supporting corporate tax research, calculation, and compliance.
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Pricing
Avalara
Bloomberg Tax
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Avalara
Bloomberg Tax
Free Trial
No
No
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
Optional
No setup fee
Additional Details
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More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Avalara
Bloomberg Tax
Features
Avalara
Bloomberg Tax
Type of tax
Comparison of Type of tax features of Product A and Product B
Avalara
7.4
Ratings
6% below category average
Bloomberg Tax
9.3
Ratings
17% above category average
Sales and Use Taxes
9.00 Ratings
8.00 Ratings
Cross-border Taxes
7.40 Ratings
10.00 Ratings
VAT / GST Taxes
5.90 Ratings
10.00 Ratings
Energy and Fuel Taxes
7.40 Ratings
00 Ratings
Tax Reporting & Compliance
Comparison of Tax Reporting & Compliance features of Product A and Product B
As a non-profit that relies on volunteers, having a system that is easy to use and cost effective is crucial. Alavara fit both of those needs for us. Also, since this is a task that is completed only once a year, it needs to be simple to use, which Alavara is. And lastly, since the IRS rules are often complicated and change regularly, it is helpful to have a vendor that stays current with the changes and incorporates them into the process which Alavara does.
The fixed asset software is very advanced for software in general, but it is limited to accounting (GAAP and Tax) fixed assets. Would love to see a more IT user friendly software allowing IT personnel to use a gun to scan the servers and computers, etc. This wouldn't necessarily be a fixed asset as many computer items are too small dollar wise, but it would be a useful feature for IT and accounting to track IT assets by locatoin, user, departmetn, etc. and would be company wide. Another software needed is for company contracts with an ability to send out emails for notifications that a given contract is coming due. Obviously, this would be for contracts and leases but is also useful for accounting and would involve the whole company as there are contracts for rentals, equipment, service maintenance agreements, capital leases, IT contracts, etc.
Has extensive research and documentation on telecommunications industry
Research is always up to date
The ability to ask questions and get clarification on specific situations with no limit as to how you ask a question and often get the answer the same day
I find it virtually impossible to access people when you have issues with anything
In my experience, everything runs through account managers and they are non-responsive and unavailable most of the time.
In my experience, 99% of all communication with anybody at Avalara has to be done via some ridiculous form or via email. Human contact is extremely difficult to resolve an issue that sometimes requires human to human contact.
Better outlay of the depreciation section, rather see periods vertically, then horizontally. The periods are difficult to move through when you need to see many months in the past or vice-versa.
Would love to see an ability to mandate certain fields when creating an asset as every company is different.
Would love to see each field have the ability to have it's own pick list, and the pick list that does exist needs to be larger to allow for a longer list rather than just 8-10, then the rest are hidden so you have to move to section 2 to see that continuing list.
I have not been able to find a company that does it better than Avalara. I still have lots of problems, but we are working through them. Based on other demos i have seen and talking with peers in other companies, this is the best.
The UI is simple and straightforward. The site is organized in a manner that is easy to understand for beginners and experts alike. There's also tons of resoruces on Avalara University at your disposal to better understand how Avalara can work best for your business needs. I would recommend Avalara to anyone wanting to investment in the betterment of their business's sales tax function
We do have trouble tying Avalara's reporting back to our POS, but we just got a new POS system and there are bugs we are still trying to work out within the POS system. I do not believe this is an Avalara issue
Avalara is not consistent in giving us information timely. For instance, right now, we have a help desk ticket with them that's been open since October. They are still trying to figure it out and we haven't gotten any feedback on where they are at or what is going on. That seems to me a very excessive amount of time to be working on a problem. Was it forgotten? Is there something bigger going on? Do they need something from us? An update would be helpful.
Also, many times when we call with an issue or concern (wrong tax rate for instance) we generally feel like the help desk assumes it's of our doing instead of theirs and doesn't truely listen when we explain the problem because we end up repeating it over and over as well as sending examples. We expect more respect on our end.
The documentation online we informative and helpful. The videos from the Avalara institute and the help tab if we have any questions and the search too were helpful. We like the ease of using the click here for more information tool about nexus and the information for the ECM Pro training were helpful. Whenever we have a question we normally get an email along with the tool as to where to find our answer. We also like that it shows information about nexus status of the states we maybe approaching and we can look more into it.
The implementation team from Avalara was very knowledgable and did a good job of passing along information so that we could maintain the system and be able to make future changes ourselves. We had asked for some custom tax setup and they worked with us to get additional taxes set up that they didn't previously have. They worked with us to pull our documentation on tax rules and make sure those were included. I had hoped more scenarios would be there out of the box to cut down on the configuration time.
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.
