Avalara vs. Thomson Reuters ONESOURCE

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.

Incentivized

ONESOURCE is well suited for organizations that want to maintain their compliance efforts within a single platform. Most of the software looks and operates in a similar manner, which makes it easy to navigate and integrate yourself into additional products. Additionally, the ONESOURCE platform is a great platform for anyone looking for a provider that stays on top of tax law changes and will quickly integrate the changes into their product.

Incentivized

• Sales tax rates at a "roof top" level
• 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

Incentivized

• The ability to recall data from prior years is great. We constantly get requests to pull prior year forms and the system allows us to complete these requests efficiently.
• The ability to track tax information events (such as print filing dates, b-notices, and recipient responses) is a huge benefit of ONESOURCE and is one of the main reasons we utilize their service over that of their competitors.
• ONESOURCE customer service is highly responsive. One of the huge benefits of working with ONESOURCE is the assigned CES who answers any & all questions relating to not only the software itself, but the underlying tax requirements and due dates, etc.

Incentivized

• 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.

• High TOC. No patching strategy for Onesource. Each bug fix is basically a new implementation, requiring an end-to-end regression test for SSabrix/Onesource and each connected ERP.
• Lack control of developments. Often a bug fix release contains changes to other - undocumented - areas within the application which leads to multiple implementation iterations.
• Limited collaboration with ERP providers. If something goes wrong in the connector to an ERP system (e.g. due to ERP version upgrade), Thomson Reuters is not as connected with the ERP vendor as could be desired i.e. the burden of connecting the ERP provider with the Onesource provider (TR) is laying with the customer. This is especially true for the Oracle Fusion integration.
• High project cost. When connecting to an ERP system for the first time , the integration with Sabrix is costly due to the need for connector development (less for the actual Sabrix configuration).

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

To reiterate - a very useful tool for private company information, otherwise not forthcoming on the public domain. It is very crucial in Company analyses for various lenses, slices and dices of Company information. Also useful in industry analysis and in list building. Overall a great research and analytics tool.

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

Incentivized

I have been using Avalara for years and do not remember ever having an outage during working hours. The service is accurate and dependable.

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

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

The ONESOURCE support has improved significantly over the years. Support sends out emails with the answer provided which helps in the future when the same issue occurs. This reduces the amount of calls to ONESOURCE Support as you can better document the calls and rely on previous answers if the same issue occurs. ONESOURCE support has also implemented a callback feature that reduces the amount of time spent on hold.

Incentivized

I wasn't here when they first started with Avalara.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

Thomson Reuters has a central location for the documents. It is time saving and truly is streamlined which is one of the main reasons why this program beats out the competition. Most of the areas that one source is lacking is at the very least the equivalent or better than the competition so the parts that it does better really elevates the software against the competition

Incentivized

There is no change that has to happen as your company grows, Avalara continues to do it's job for any size company

Incentivized

• We went from two staff members down to one staff member dedicated to monitoring and reconciling sales tax with the G/L.
• It takes the one staff member less time to monitor sales tax than having to go through and calculate and file in each state.
• Avalara gives us confidence that the returns are filed accurately and timely every month.

Incentivized

• By moving the tax return preparation process in-house by utilizing ONESOURCE, the company has significantly reduced the costs associated with filing the income tax returns.
• ONESOURCE has given the company better control over the data.
• By utilizing ONESOURCE, the company has better internal documentation that will assist in defending future audits without having to rely on outside accounting firms.

Incentivized