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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Vertex
Score 8.0 out of 10
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Vertex combines tax research with technology to improve tax accuracy and
consistency on sales and purchase transactions. The automation aims to support high volume and complex transactions at speed and scale to streamline internal
processes and improve audit performance. Integrations to
ERP, e-commerce, procurement, and other billing systems enables a single tax
engine to seamlessly support a growing business. In addition to tax
determination, Vertex provides tools and services to automate and…
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.
It is easy to use, and the user interface is very interactive. A beginner can also work with ease and have no difficulty accessing Vertex. It is straightforward to understand how Vertex works. The tax calculation mechanism is good and accurate.
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.
Critical changes! I feel they should be more aware of changes in the states. Sometimes we get these changes from them after we file our returns! I feel they should be up on any changes that are important for returns.
Support is a big issue. Vertex used to be excellent with their support. When I called with a question I felt I was speaking to a professional who knows the product inside and out. Now when I call I get someone who says "That's a realy good question I will have to look into that" Then days go by before I get an answer. Sometimes I don't get an answer at all. This was not the case in prior years.
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.
We are satisfied with the overall performance of Vertex. The software has provided my company with many efficiencies. We have shorted our audits and found that many audits are happy that we are using Vertex to calculate our taxes. We no longer need to worry about updating our rates each month since Vertex sends us a file to upload
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
Great program, but a lot of features are still manual. It's difficult to set recurring monthly reports in a time frame of "Previous Month" and we have to kick them off. We have to manually delete reports, there isn't an option to choose multiple at once. Data that is transferred into Vertex returns is quirky as well, taking multiple steps to update lines of data.
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
Our Vertex performance is good, although we are now experiencing Error 502 when adding additional data points to our transaction tester single tests. At Exchange, I was told to reach out to support....that most likely the On Demand system needed some additional CPU resource added. I have a currently open ticket, that has not yet been fixed on this matter
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.
I cannot speak from personal experience, but our IT staff has found contacting Vertex support staff to be challenging. One coworker has gone through several support tickets because he was an unrecognized contact. He has also expressed frustration that communication with support staff is conducted solely by email, drawing out issues over an extended length of time that could be more easily resolved by a brief phone call.
By training I'm referring to our engagement with Vertex Consulting's professional services group. Each person on the engagement had prior leasing industry tax experience and most if not all used O Series before joining Vertex. Consultants with industry specific tax experience provide so much more than just "training". They are able to engage in deep tax technical discussions with actual experience while in private practice. This coupled with having visibility to how numerous other leasing peers approach similar tax issues is a huge plus on top of the standard training.
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.
Vertex has offered multiple webinars for the products we have purchased that are informative and helpful. I've also attended a few of the Vertex annual conferences where I was able to strength my knowledge of Vertex. I also found that their online library and videos can be helpful in resolving issues and answering questions.
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.
The implementation is challenging, make no mistake but will provide much value over time. Make sure you have full support of IT and your major stakeholders in your company. I found that while many people claimed to understand tax was important, they had no idea how deep tax in entrenched throughout the lease life cycle.
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.
Vertex is more flexible and by using Vertex you need fewer people to maintain tax calculations. In addition, Tax rate update is maintained by Vertex, so you do not need to track and support tax rate update.
There needs to be a time-consuming setup both in the Enterprise Resource Platform and in Vertex and the related tools as well but once this is all established, Vertex is very proficient at calculating Sales and Use Tax in the USA and in Canada with GST/HST, as well as several of the provinces where we are located. As we added plants in different jurisdictions via greenfield expansion and aquisition, Vertex was able to integrate those as long as the tax department is fully informed of the system.
Vertex for the solution that we needed was half as much as the old tax software that we used
Our past solutions have not been able to exempt certain customers, so we were spending a lot of time manually adjusting sales orders in two systems (Netsuite and BigCommerce)
We are now able to add more complex tax rules, such as charging sales tax on digital, food, and clothing items differently than we were able to before
