General Consultant Discussion

Those of you who know me may know that I am a long-time Avalara fan but if you didn't see their newsletter yesterday, a certain rather unknown Sage partner was listed above the Sage partner that everyone knows in the Q3 Partner Metrics section. There's a first for everything!

Well, toot, toot goes the horn! Congratulations! You knocked off some pretty stiff competition! You Rock!

Thanks Jeff! It made my day, not so much that we were mentioned but that we beat out the honorable mention - that never happens!!!

Congrats Therese! Show 'em how it's done.

What's your feedback on Avlara? Oh and congrats...!

I like the product and the people very much! I have 12 customers using it, plus us. If you have any sort of complicated tax jurisdictions, it is sooo nice! Just for the city of Minneapolis, there are four separate jurisdictions - state, city, county and a special transit one. You can't base the tax schedule on the city name because lots of suburbs use Minneapolis but aren't in the city or county jurisdiction. Can't go by zip code because when the transit tax took effect, there were about two pages of zip codes that were only partially in the jurisdiction. In other words, a nightmare! We have an Accpac client that has had some issues but it works differently for Accpac - a separate window pops up with the tax detail - but in MAS, you get a slight splash screen as it goes out and calculates the tax based on the ship-to address then it returns it to the tax field. Sweet!

Too lazy to look for my one client using Avalara - Therese, is the link current for V 4.4 PU7? I think my client is on PU3 or PU4.

Great job Therese! You rock!

@JeffSchwenk the link is good through PU6 for 4.4. And thanks for the email regarding your past AvaTax experience. I'm confused as to why you were upset though. They cancelled your customers service as requested. Too bad it was a bad experience for you. :(

Actually, what we wanted all along was for Avalara to step up to the plate and fix the bugs that existed in v4.1. It was SUCH a struggle and their attitude was ""if you think our product sucks, try the competitions""! Pitty that the only person who was competent back then was the one who shut off the service without any notice. Client did terminate the service but went back when v4.3 was releasesed. I kept my distance and let them struggle with the reports. Since the company interface is a consultant paid by the hour, there is no incentive to streamline any of the reports so I really don't know if things are better now. Are they? Or is the attitude still the same - Try the competitions..................

They can fall behind on the product updates, I know. We had an Accpac customer upgrade but I think we were the only one at that version and it too, was like a beta. Eventually, they got it together. You know that DSD is the one who does the MAS integration, correct? I blamed the Accpac situation on Avalara since they do that integration internally but if you have issues with MAS, while you still have to go through Avalara, they are somewhat dependent on DSD. Just my .02.

DSD was the only bright spot in that endeavor! Avalara didn't know or do much in those early days.