Avalara

If I could to a zero star I would. I just tried to speak with Jessica Davis who is their Operations Manager (manager, as in a person with higher people and leadership skills) and she was the most unprofessional, disrespectful person, didn’t even let me finish asking one question and she promptly and rudely hung up on me. So much for trying to do good business. I guess they also don’t respect other professionals either. What a sour taste!!!

I’ve been using Avalara for about two years. The first year there was an issue with getting my annual sales tax withdrawn in the correct month. Fortunately I had a great account rep who understood the problem and worked to quickly resolve my issue. He moved on and I was assigned a new account rep. My new rep was unable to answer basic questions i.e.: «I’d like to confirm that my annual tax is set up to be withdrawn in June.» She referred me to the customer service 800 number or to a temp (His name literally had «accountemps» in the email extension.) Avalara advertises that it has account managers whose «job is to answer questions about your account or help you evaluate new solutions» so I called Alex DeBlois, the customer loyalty manager. He could have helped to resolved the issue by assigning me a new rep (my first one was fine!) which is what I asked for. Instead he was super defensive, and said it was not my account rep’s job to know details about my account. Really? Not sure why I have an account rep then (and don’t advertise account reps on your site!) Changing tax software for my eCommerce store is a hassle and wish I would have known what my experience with Avalara would be like before signing up with with them. Their slogan is «making sales tax less taxing» –this certainly hasn’t been my experience.

This company continually calls and spams our company. This is a constant thing. I think I received three emails in the last 5 days from this clown:
Scott McFarlane
Founder and CEO
Avalara
I would never consider dealing with a company who acts like a greasy telemarketer. They are a mail or two away from a report to the BBB.

Avalara keeps calling us. Despite me telling them to stop calling, to remove our numbers from their system, despite our email history detailing all of the issues.
They are a software company that cannot figure out how to remove phone numbers from their databases, or take notes when someone calls, so there is a history, so they have an idea who they’re calling and what’s happened before when they call. This is how bad of a software company they are.

We used Avalara’s Sales and Use tax services for our company for a year and had nothing but problems. The staff was friendly, but completely oblivious of local tax laws and incapable of adapting their software to each state’s needs. They also had difficulty submitting our returns on time and we got numerous late notices. Avalara would ignore our late notices for months until our sales tax accounts would get canceled and our credit report marred. I was never able to get them to resolve these problems for me and had to pay the late fees and penalties myself. They also will not give you copies of your sales tax returns unless you ask for them one by one. I was promised improvement many times, however they continued to fail over and over. I would not recommend Avalara at all, and would suggest KPMG instead.