What are you all using as an alternative to Avalara/Avatax in QuickBooks to calculate sales tax?

The only other decent tax calculator I've found was TaxJar. I went with Avalara for the "ease of integration," however. Whoops!

Good luck out there! None of the posted "fixes" has worked for me so far. We're just holding off on sending out invoices until we can properly calculate tax again.

Hi Archie,

Does QuickBooks add the correct rate based on the Nexus map for all jurisdictions by state? Or is it just a manual tax rate that I add for the entire state? If it does the former, than I will definitely check it out.

Thanks Paco- glad to hear it's not just me! I use the Avatax plugin/module for my website and it work perfectly there. But in QuickBooks, it just doesn't want to function properly. Best of luck!

Oh, I had a nice response whipped up for Archie, but they're just trying to help so I deleted it.

You can add in sales tax rates by item, location or customer I think. We used to do this back before a few states contacted us and opened our eyes to the liability. It's impossible to do correctly without some sort of software help now. 13,000+ tax jurisdictions, along with tax holidays and special rates for some products (no tax on work boots in NJ I hear?) Either you're small enough to squeak by for now, or you're gonna get slapped with a fine in the near future. Avalara is just so big and integral now that they don't care.

It’s 2 weeks later and we still hs d no resolution to the Avatax QBD issue we were having. Have you been able to resolve the most recent issues?   The software simply will no longer function with our QBD program 

I just wanted to post an update. Since the original post I've updated my QuickBooks to the newest version (V. 23) and I also installed the newest Avatax calculator (V. 99). Since the install I have a whole new batch of problems! The New errors are event callback errors. I found a posted fix for that, and it appeared to work. But, the new issue is that Avatax now runs an address validation on every single transaction. I reached out to Avalara and they told me that I needed to simply turn of the validation in the settings. I did that, it still attempts to validate every address. It also locks up both QuickBooks and Avatax upon opening. Everything becomes non-responsive. when I spoke with their tech support, they suggested that maybe my install was bad. I uninstalled / reinstalled, etc. It still won't function. So, I've gutted the module from my users workstations and we are back to using an online calculator for the Nexus map. Has anyone else found something useful out there?

I experienced similar problems and I finally had one Avalara representative ask me if I tried going back to the older .95 version. After I uninstalled.99 version and reinstalled.95 version, Avatax began working properly again. You also have to make sure you decline or tell it “no” to the certificate “add on” under preferences. You only one want integration of Avatax under “apps” and you can verify that it is the .95 version of Avatax

That's interesting. I just ended another screen share with the Avalara techs. There were two of them working on it with me. They seem stumped. Interestingly enough, they let me know that there is a new version of the connector coming out next week. I wonder if the error will mysteriously stop with the new version. I'll post an update after.