- The 1-3 hour wait made filing quite difficult when the original return had an error. Submitting a second return to cancel the first required another 1-3 hour wait. Then submitting the final (third) return required another 1-3 hour wait. Filing one state easily turned into a whole day ordeal if there was an error.

- Support from level one/two staff for difficult tax questions did not help. Level one/two staff gave a vocal repeat from the online help guide. Level three support was acceptable however.

- Tax returns filed with Avalara are done via a rather cumbersome spreadsheet. Don't expect someone to hold your hand. Rather, it requires many trial and error submissions to figure out how to make the Avalara engine work.

Note: A basic "shipping product" business like Amazon/Walmart would do fairly well with Avalara. However, a company that does complex construction projects will have challenges. We ended up reverting to filing taxes manually.

Whatever it is, reading reviews of Avalara suggests it's beyond the level smaller businesses can afford and has also been increasing dramatically from one year to the next for some time.

Avalara have a strong web presence because they've always been good at presenting key information like current tax rates and forthcoming changes. Their content marketing is excellent. But as soon as you look for more details about anything they offer, you seem to be straight into "enterprise contact-us sales process" mode.

However, that is because you're paying for their customer support, and Avalara customer support is very good. Every issue we've had has been dealt with promptly, including issues where Avalara misfiled a return. (Long story short: they owned up to the mistake and corrected it with the state without any additional cost or penalties to us.)