Avalara vs. CCH® SureTax®

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

SureTax has been the perfect solution; not only are they readily available to fix any and all of your questions, but they are also extremely attentive regarding the information requested. They are the best when it comes to entrepreneurs who are entering into a space that they are not fully aware of from a state and local tax compliance perspective. They can be better from the perspective of developing their client interface.

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 product is optimized to handle invoices with large number of line items. We've fast response times even on invoices with hundreds of thousands of line items.
• It is a SaaS solution which saves costs, increases maintainability and is entirely web based
• REST API is efficient, logically laid out and effortless to use

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.

• In my opinion, the productivity website is clunky and limited. It's better than it used to be but still needs lots of work.
• It seems a little too difficult to get an answer when sometimes all I need is a quick what taxes apply in this area.
• In my experience, sales people are WAY TOO PUSHY. They need to understand that us users aren't always the decision makers and that there can be 3 levels of approval that the "negotiations" have to go through. So getting pushy and frustrated with us users is not the way to get the service agreements extended.

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

We switched our tax service from Avalara to SureTax years ago. Prior to this, we manually prepared the data and ran a report uploading and then got the tax result every time. With Suretax providing enough and flexable APIs, we redesigned and implemented our new application to communicate with SureTax seamlessly and automatically. This greatly reduced our workload, improves the system efficiency, and increased the data accuracy.

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

SureTax is very reliable in with the integration with Microsoft Dynamics GP. It provides accurate tax calculations in accordance with tax updates. SureTax also has a user-friendly interface that makes it easy to navigate. It is easy to add customers and also run reports on the website. The overall manageability of it is great!

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

It has taken much longer than we would like to get certain issues - and problems - resolved. And the initial product support as we designed the implementation left much to be desired

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

I currently use or have used the products above or versions of them - I use Rev.io the billing platform, not the PSA, I no longer use Sage 100, we are currently using Sage 300, more on the server version than the cloud version - but we have it configured to talk to both. So CCH® SureTax® is just another tool in the toolbelt as it stacks up against the rest. Everything has its place and time. Sage300 handles the bulk of the accounting, Rev.io does the billing, CCH® SureTax® handles the tax. That's the simplest way to explain it. I don't have to spell out how much complexity goes behind those statements. If you're an accountant, you know.

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

• positive impact on resources due to accessibility by more team members
• positive impact on resources due to willingness of other team members to use this GUI - it's more inviting
• positive impact on timing due to strict deadlines so I simply CANNOT be pulled off to help with other projects which often happened when deadlines were later in the month
• once the prepayment module is put into production that is also going to help with tracking (for states like FL, GA etc. where the number only changes once/year because we're told SureTax will "remember" that month to month and keep it filled in on each return)

Incentivized