DO NOT USE THIS SERVICE! This would have to be the most painful company I have ever worked with. Being sold a done-for-you service, paying for state registration fees and then being told I need to set them up myself. I've been through 3 or 4 account managers now in less than a year and all they try do it sell you more products. You ask them questions or for help they just CC you in with someone else who either sends you back to the account manager, doesn't reply or doesn't help. I wish I had read the reviews before signing up, this is the kind of company that drags profitable business backwards. AVOID AVOID AVOID read more

I would not recommend Avalara to any business owner. This company is not responsive. I open a case with no response for over 1 month. If this is the type of customer service expected I suggest to look for another organization. read more

We haven't been able to get through the initial onboarding process as it seems others haven't either. After 4 months of trying with little to no support, I have canceled the service which I never got to even use. Now they are deciding if they will give me a refund, even though they have provided no services at all. I'm not holding my breath. Really disappointing!!! read more

OMG, I so wish I would have read these reviews before I attempted to work with these people. I just formed a Small LLC and used LegalZoom. They gave Avalara my information and they contacted me to help get my business license completed. I called LegalZoom and verified that they work with Avalara, and they confirmed. Now I am upset that they gave this company my information. They charged my credit card, and now I can not get them to call me back, and when I call it goes to VM. I am probably going to loose my $250, but this is a lesson for me! Never trust a business and always research them before doing business with them. read more

This was the worst customer service experience I have ever had. They took 6 weeks to file my business license and then we found out they used the incorrect mailing address! There was no way to reach a person directly and it takes 2 weeks for someone to finally call you back. read more

Solid software and an intuitive web app. Horrible customer service would be an understatement. Unresponsive account reps (as in they take weeks to get back to me and don't typically respond until I send an email saying something blunt like, "[account rep], please respond."). Customer service takes minimum 5 business days to respond, even then you're stuck with someone who is typing things off of a script which I could have solved myself if it were that easy, takes additional weeks to get a decent rep. Even after that, nearly impossible to get someone on the phone for complex issues. Very grateful we have a rockstar of an I.T. director, or Avalara would've been a much bigger time- suck than it already is. If you don't have a top- tier I.T. department, don't even think of using Avalara. Sales tax isn't hard, hire a part- time college student or someone on Fiverr or Upwork instead to do your filing and compliance until you grow into a point where a solid I.T. department can make up for Avalara's lack of accountability or customer service. Otherwise, you will waste countless hours trying to solve or adjust for technical issues from Avalara impacting everything from your cash flow to your sales process while it takes weeks before they make you a priority. Wish I worked here before we made the move to Avalara so I could prevent my company from making this mistake. We're not selling internationally, so our sales tax can be done by a monkey with a browser and a spreadsheet. What does take intelligence and effort is cleaning up their messes or solving for their technical issues. Unfortunately, we're stuck paying them for the time being. read more

Absolutely horrific support, nobody ever replies to your emails for help or support. If you show up a few minutes late to a meeting, they email you to tell you they are waiting and then leave the call and tell you they only wait 5 minutes! if you have trouble with Zoom, they don't care, and their entire support team is in India, so they are in a different time zone with lack of organization and lack of understanding to troubleshoot the problems. read more

They are gouging customer by increasing pricing by, in my case, 2,000% without notification of that price increase. The only customer service appears to be in India and nobody is calling me to discuss this situation. Everything is by email... I have asked for a call numerous times. I continue to fight the $1245 charge via email. I have also had to dispute the charge as fraud with my cc company. read more

Their customer service is extremely horrible. We bought the managed tax filing package because we need to file Chicago. Two months before the package renewal date (renewal date in Nov), we requested to downgrade the package to standard package. Emailed to our account manager several times. No response. Then signed up his calendar to meet with him. He told me he never got my requests. During the call he instructed me to remove Chicago and informed him when it's done. I did and email him. However the renewal invoice is still no change. Met with him again. He said he told me the new proposal was sent to me but no response. Checked all junk folder but I can't locate it. Then I asked him to send again. To be safe I also signed up his calendar to make sure he sent it. Meeting was either cancelled ( he stated he was still working on the proposal??) or no show. I have also filed tickets but either the help desk told me to contact my account manager or closed the ticket without making sure my issue is resolved. I have reopened the ticket three times. Two weeks after the new year a new account manager was assigned. At first he told me I can't make change during the contract term. I have showed him all the tickets and records of conversations with the previous AM. Then he said he would help me. This time the new account manager can get my emails but still need me to chase update. Last week I was told my package can be changed to standard BUT only applied to all returns I haven't used. Any filing between the renewal date and our meeting cannot be adjusted. Today I got the notification my account will be suspended as no payment for the managed package invoice. I have sent notification of downgraded two months before renewal (I have confirmed with my ex account manager that I can make change anytime before renewal.) The entire issue is all on Avalara side. They don't process my request on time, then disappearance of the AM, then threaten me to pay even the issue is not resolved. I am disappointed and strongly NOT recommend buying their software due to extremely poor customer service. read more

Don't know much about how the company works once you can actually get your account going but I've been trying to get my account integrated with my company for months and have talked to multiple people and NONE of them can help me. They don't even try. They just say "yeah its not integrated, call this person ___" and then the same thing over and over. And it's difficult to even figure out how to contact customer service. After months of trying and now seeing the terrible reviews here I am giving up and moving on. read more

We've used Avalara for a few years and had nothing but problems. Billing is a NIGHTMARE. Every year I have billing issues. Trying to find someone to help is frustrating. Year after year they would bill me incorrectly, for returns and usage. The most recent hiccup is payments were remitted late uncurring penalties and interest. They're telling me it's because the filing frequency was different, yet the state says that isn't the case at all. I have a feeling I will end up just having to pay the penalties as with each passing day interest is adding up. AVOID read more

I agree back in 2019 when we started with Avalara, implementation was a nightmare. They were not at all helpful, I had to figure most of the integration myself, and for that I give 2 stars. To this day, it has gotten better. However their services are way overpriced. read more

Terrible terrible terrible! Avoid at all costs! I signed up for their service due to GoDaddy recommendation. I later found out that my sales tax license was never even registered in my state. I then went to look through my account and they claimed to have filed my returns for the past 3 months! How could you file something with the state when I was never registered and not making any sales? Regardless of that, I was sent an invoice for up to January 2024 for $183. Chatted with support and was told they would fix the issues and send a new invoice. But they already charged my account! Now I have to contact my bank. Seriously so annoying. Just do what you said you would do in the first place. read more

"Customer support/service is terrible." Daniel Catalano "It's hard to imagine how this company retains paying customers." Mike Ryan "Most emails go completely ignored." Eric Anderson "As much a service business as software and Avalara's service is terrible..." Aaron R. Anyone else had extensive trouble with Avalara as a sales tax splution for your web store? I have been plagued with trouble since signing up and it keeps getting worse. Please tell me there is a better company out there for sales tax compliance for small companies! I threatened cancelation of their software and service just to get some attention after over 6 months of no communication with multiple connection and calculation issues on our Big Commerce store and QuickBooks. Multiple emails, support tickets, phone calls, all ignored. The chat sessions all ended with a case number and escalation with the assurance "Someone from our higher tier support team will be in contact..." Nothing for over 6 months... Then a bill for $1800 dollars when my highest bill over years of work with them was never over $200.00. That's when I snapped. They then, I can only imagine out of spite, canceled my return filings outside of procedure and with no notice. This has cost my company money due to penalties and time to determine the issue. Next, after their direct support individual agreed that the cancelation was not done correctly or by their internal policy/procedure, I was sent this message weeks after speaking with their Tony Duffy. (Avalara Account Managent Team member Jenine) Hi Joshua, My apologies for any miscommunication regarding the cancellation of your subscription. We can most certainly get you reinstated. Please schedule a call with my colleague, Tony Duffy (cc'd), next week to discuss in greater detail the AvaTax and Returns subscriptions which are best for your current business needs: https://lnkd.in/esR4cDTR (https://lnkd.in/esR4cDTR) I also understand you are needing to backfile for CO, 2021Q3. The cost associated is $250/return, with a $500 project minimum, and a 4-6 week completion estimate. Since you will need one Return filed, we can send you the quote for $500 to process your backfiling project. When that is signed and processed, the backfiling team will reach out to you to gather the information they need. Please let me know if you need any further assistance. Thank you. Kind Regards, Jenine | Account Management Team (My response) Jenine,    The cancelation of our quarterly filings by the Avalara team was done outside of procedure and without proper notice as confirmed and recorded by Tony Duffy. $500 for backfiling is agreguous and more than I am going to pay for a return filling which should have been filed by Avalara. This is one of many extemely poor customer service items and bad policies which have me frustrated and disappointed in Avalara as a solution for a necessary tax calculation and filing service.      I will reach out to Tony and come to a better solution than you have provided.  Joshua Beaumont  President  Long's Shadow Holster,  Inc. 720 453 3903 read more

Can't get an answer. $450 was taken out of my account for services I didn't ask for. My "account manager" doesn't reply. I am canceling my account today. read more

Spent hours on the phone with Avalara. Hard to reach a live person regarding most sales tax being overcharged in a zip code with both in and out of city limits tax rates. They had no interest in correcting this. It was interesting to note that when searching "review Avalara" without putting Yelp in search terms what came up appeared to be sites that were actually Avalara advertisement sites. read more

I called Avalara support (case#23448942) for help today for a questioned invoice. There are two invoices should not have been tax exempted. I explained why I called and the rep was looking into the issue. He couldn't figure out why and after I try to explain what happened, he said "okok, that's all our fault!! You didn't do anything wrong!!", and he HANGED UP ON ME!!!!!!! SUPER RUDE SUPRE RUDE SUPER RUDE!!!!!! I was trying to help and the service rep hang up the phone???!!!! EXCUSE ME???!!!! I have been a customer with Avalara over EIGHT years and never been treated like this!!!! I feel so offended and harassed by the rep called TOBIAS G. Does he behave like this because I have Asian accent? read more

This is a review only on the Avalara sales tax report format. We register sales tax accounts, process reports, and file sales tax returns in all states and locals for many domestic/international companies that use various sales tax software vendors/sales channels such as Vertex, Avalara, Amazon, Walmart, Shopify, and many others. Many of our clients use Avalara for tax calculations and they use our managed filing service to file the returns. We would either receive the monthly Avalara report from clients or we login to download it. There are a few different report formats and we use the one with the needed columns that allow us to distribute taxes to the proper jurisdictions after combining reports from all sales channels. Over many years, we have not yet experienced any outage or difficulty to download the Avalara report and so there was no need to contact Avalara for any support. We have no visibility on our client's experience with integration or other interactions with Avalara. Many users with large taxes come to our managed filing service for one reason or another. The Avalara report availability has been reliable over the years except that some new columns were added a while ago which required us to reconfigure our setup. This is a minor event. We are happy with the network availability of the reports and hope it continues. read more

terrible company. terrible service. raised prices by 4-8k a year. I never ask for help and when I do have 1 issue company is impossible to get in touch with and get the help you need. steer clear of this company out to get your money as much as possible. read more

Do yourself a favor and file your own taxes or get someone else to do it. That is what I'm going to do. Avalara has been the worst recommendation by my vacation rental company. I pay for my general excise and lodging taxes early but they never file on my behalf with the pertinent tax authorities until the absolute last second. No excuse for that. And not only is their process purposefully confusing, but their customer service is awful. I try emailing them and I either don't hear back for days or I don't get a response entirely. And when I call in, I get disconnected or have to wait on hold forever only to end up talking to someone who is not friendly and has no ability to help, because they don't have access to my account. None of them have ever resolved my concerns to my satisfaction. They want to collect your subscription per month but they will do the absolute minimum to earn that. read more

We have been using Avalara for 4 years having nothing but bad to say. They changed 4 representatives of us. Extremely irresponsive. They messed up our sales tax collection a big time and refused to take any responsibility. The software is designed to do nothing. The tax holding and payment are all wrong. Their rep made lots of mistakes on our tax study and when our accountants point them out, they have an extremely bad attitudes and it is consistent across their entire team. We have not paid much attention to sales tax until we realized their software is not functioning at all. read more

They failed to provide a service in whole that we paid them for, adding a state to our nexus, and upon our discovery of the error, refused to accept responsibility or correct the issue. They provided horrible customer service, often taking over a week to respond, sometimes failing to respond at all. After the forced upgrade to ECM, some of our data was lost. We found that Avalara's system had duplicated certificates (each of which we were charged to store). Despite this being an important software for our company, we were dismissed at the annual meeting by our "account manager" who not only rolled her eyes but raised her voice. Because of these issues we could not justify them DOUBLING the annual cost. read more

Somehow I went from a free account, to being billed $50/year, $240/year, to suddenly $7K/year with no notice. And when I cancelled my account per there knowledge base/support article, they still charged me. Horrible service! They never really answer your question. Read all the reviews left for this horrible company and head the warnings! read more

Avalara chat support may tell you your free trial will end when the time is up but this is not the case. This has been a nightmare. Long story short, I've been trying to cancel my free subscription for almost a year now and I'm getting the feeling that misinforming customers about how to cancel and billing them afterward is the primary way Avalara turns a profit. Based on reviews here, I'm grateful I didn't follow through with the service because it sounds like continuing customers are equally as unhappy. And before you say "Please contact our team at..." I already have. Many times. And although I've sent in the cancellation form and asked for guidance on specific items to select on the form, I'm still unsure of whether I'll receive a bill later for not selecting the "Communication" item or one of the other 12 items on the form that it's unclear whether you're automatically enrolled in with any of their plans. read more

I wish I read these reviews before signing up with to to file my state sales tax! Customer service is non-existent at best and rude and unhelpful at worst. After finally ending my subscription with them, I log into one of the states I owe sales tax in and see nothing has been filed for 6 months, yet I've been charged every time. Do yourself a favor and find someone on fiverr to do this for a fraction of the cost. read more

Avalara is a waste of time and a waste of money. The customer service is horrific and they make everything more difficult. It is worth the pain of doing it yourself. They do not make anything easier. It is a money grab. They try to get you in their system and create all sorts of annoying barriers when you try to leave. I wish I would have read the yelp reviews before signing up. I regret signing up for Avalara. read more

I wish I could give them no stars! I've never written a review and my service has been THAT BAD that I finally felt compelled to write my first one. I've paid thousands of dollars for Avalara to consistently drop the ball. I'm getting demand letters from states needing to remit taxes I approved and synced my account to auto withdraw from. I've approved payments in countless emails, I can't get them on the phone, I'm chasing them down to respond to my emails (following up 2 -3 times to bring it back to the top of their inboxes throughout the course of a week) and still, they are fumbling through the only service they provide. read more

First of all they did not file my tax so i cancelled. I cancelled my subscription and they keep charging me 19$ in just 1 month this march! Scammy feel damn this isnt right i couldnt get any representative to fix it. Im being passed on. Ridiculous. read more

Avalara has absolutely horrible customer service. We're a small business in Seattle. I'd strongly encourage you to find another sales tax provider. Their staff members take weeks, sometimes months, to respond to emails. And then they don't even read the email carefully. It's embarrassing. I posted a review on Google. They promised to escalate the matter. But it never happened. The only people who respond to emails are the sales staff. This company has a long way to go. I'm sure they'll reply to this review with some nonsense about how they'll reach out to me -- don't believe it. They won't. read more

One thing to be aware when canceling Avalara services: Even if you cancel your annual subscription service way ahead of time and even receiving several emails confirming that your services are canceled, this company will still charge your card on your subscription end date. Advice: either remove your card from your account (not always possible), change your cards expiration date in the account or close your card all together. It's easier to get a new card than to deal with their customer service. read more

Business start-ups - please do not use this company for permits. They will take your money and never follow up. They submitted the initial request without any research into the city's requirements. The package was rejected, and there was no follow-up. Disregarding my grand opening. I was forced to take matters into my own hands to get the business approved, it's been over a week since start-up data and not one follow-up. Enturperners please be aware. read more

Have had Avalara for 2 years now and I wouldn't suggest them to anyone. Every time I bring up an issue with the account reps they "escalate" the issue which actually just leads to several months before I get a response, and usually the response is, nothing we can do although it was our fault! Guess it'll just have to be fixed next year (maybe). Or "hey I'll forward this to the correct team," and also never get a response. And don't get me started on technical support. Technical support is the rudest group of people I've ever had the displeasure of talking with, and more incompetent than even quickbook's support which is impressive. I'm not even sure they know what their program does? No, literally. If not for the fact that I already had to spend a lot of time implementing Avalara, I would just find a different method. I would suggest hiring an accountant instead to file your sales taxes if you can (the cost would end up being about the same given how Avalara basically scams you), my accountant previously quoted something like $100-150 per filing while Avalara costs around 80-100 pre-scam anyway, and you can trust the accountant more to file it correctly. Or finding a different program where their support actually knows what the company they work for does lmao read more

Dont believe them. They lie. Their contracts are terrible. They drop you off after implementation and they are gone

I cannot even begin to explain all of the horrendous things that have happened with Avalara. Please, please avoid this company if you can at all. HORRENDOUS customer service. INCORRECT filing, truly incompetent reps. Shopify doesn't offer any other service/app to help with this and we're completely held hostage. Shame on Avalara for taking our money and wasting it. Furthermore, they owe us a refund for a part of the state registrations they could not complete (by their own admission) and they won't give it to us. I had to file a VISA dispute. read more

This is not the cheapest option, so just use tax jar or any other option that is not avalara. They are fast to SELL you whatever you need. That changes after you have signed up and things dont work as expected. I have a ticket that has been open for 9 days with a mission critical sales tax calculation issue. Every time I chat in to support (which is buried and hard to find) they tell me they have escalated my ticket to a higher priority and someone will get back to me. (This is all off shored, guessing by the names of the agents). Half the time they don't read or understand the ticket and tell me to contact woocommerce since avalaras plugin isnt working. I have an account manager who hasn't answered when I have called but she did email me back. Then when i asked why the ticket hasnt been updated in 2 days, she hasnt responded. read more

Worst customer service imaginable! I manage a business and we have been using avalara for tax calculation and filing for a couple of years. When it's time to renew your service it's real easy to get schedule a zoom call but as soon as that's over they won't help you with even the simplest things. They leave you completely on your own to figure out all the integrations and registrations. That's bad enough but they recently tried to re-bill me for last year's service period, which I paid a year ago. It took a month of emails to get them to realize or acknowledge the error. When they finally did, instead of voiding the extra invoice, they kept that open but applied my previous invoice payment as a credit. The problem with that is that they are billing last year's services at this year's rates, which is about 30% higher that the rates for services I already paid! This equates to almost $3,000. Imagine if you bought a car for $10,000 then a year later the dealer sends you a bill for $3,000 because this year that same car is $13,000. That's essentially what this crooks are trying to do. There is currently a class action lawsuit filed against Avalara, for over 8 billion dollars, for misleading investors. After reading the countless reviews here and on yelp I will be surprised if another class action lawsuit for defrauding their customers doesn't happen soon. If so, I plan on being a part of it. read more

If you do business with these clowns, do not give them debit card information for payments, use a credit or so if you can set it up so they can bill you. They sent me a bill for renewing subscriptions that was 1000% higher than the previous year. Then they sent me a notification that that billing was in error and I would be charged 10% over the previous year. The next thing I know they have taken the 1000% increase amount out of my bank account. I file a claim with them and they agree I was charged the wrong amount. They then send me an invoice for the correct amount and withdraw funds for that and say that the case is closed. I open another claim to get the overcharge refunded and haven't made any headway in a month. My bank says that I should have given them a credit card and not the debit card, as that has better fraud protection. I'm giving Avalara a few more days and if I don't get some action may bank will file a fraud claim against Avalara. I will not be renewing any services with Avalara in the future. read more

I have used Avalara for a year and was pleased with the service. However this year has been awful. I can't get a person to talk to me about my account. All the numbers go to an answering service in India. Then all I get is canned emails. I'm canceling all services today. read more

I signed up for the Business License service ($499). They said less than 10 days, now it's estimated at 20 or more days. Their customer service is TERRIBLE. I've been trying to get feedback on the status of my licenses, as it's time sensitive and I may now need to apply on my own. After approx .15 calls (they only answered once) and numerous messages, I have not had the issue addressed. Avoid this "service" at all costs. By the time you realize they have absolutely no concern for you as a customer, you would have already lost invaluable time and money!! read more

The system seems to work well after the initial setup. However, when you have any questions, it's a nightmare to get any real answers or help. First of, they have various internal teams that handle discrete tasks. 70% of the time, rather than answering your questions, they pass you on to a different team who will then pass you on to yet another team. The end result is often "read this help article" or "contact the state tax authority directly". Secondly, it usually takes them more than 3 business days to provide those unhelpful answers. They also don't pay any attention to the information you already gave, e.g. asking the same question three times. As a result, we rarely solve a problem before the filing deadline and they'll suggest engaging their backfiling service, i.e. you pay more due to their incompetency. It's the worst service we've ever received! read more