Avalara integration guide

When you integrate Avalara companies and financial sites, the taxes for sales invoices and credit memos are calculated automatically. When tax rules change, they are updated automatically. You just need to make sure your company data, items, and customers are current.

Before you begin

Before you begin your setup, your company profile in Sage Distribution and Manufacturing Operations needs to include:

• The US address that matches the profile for Avalara.
• The Avalara AvaTax tax calculation engine.

About Avalara for tax calculations

US tax collection is based on several factors such as your company address and the addresses you ship to. Avalara AvaTax takes these and other factors into consideration to calculate the appropriate sales tax. Other factors can include:

• What you sell
• Size of your business
• How you sell things, online or in store
• Who your customer is, such as a reseller, a nonprofit, and so on

Connect with Avalara

You need to make the connection between Sage Distribution and Manufacturing Operations and AvaTax on the Avalara configuration page. After setting up the connection, you can load data from Avalara.

1. On the General tab, make sure Sandbox mode is selected so you can test your connection.
2. Enter your Avalara account ID and license key.
3. Test your connection before continuing.

Load data from Avalara

After testing your connection, you can load information directly from Avalara such as your US companies, entities that are tax exempt, and tax codes that you use.

Data is loaded on the Avalara configuration page on the General tab.

Companies

This process uploads companies and financial sites from your Avalara account. When the upload is complete, you need to go the Company mapping tab to create the one-to-one connections between your US-based companies and financial sites defined in Sage Distribution and Manufacturing Operations and those you uploaded from Avalara.

1. In the Load data from Avalara block, select Companies.
2. You receive a notification that the upload is in progress and working in the background.

3. The Companies button remains grayed out until the process is complete.

   The time to complete depends on the number of companies you are uploading.
   

4. When the process is complete, go to the Company mapping tab.
5. Select Add.
6. In the panel that opens, select the type of entity: Company or Financial site.
7. Depending on the entity type, select the company or financial site that exists in Sage Distribution and Manufacturing Operations that you want to map to.
8. The Avalara company field provides a list to the companies and financial sites uploaded to Sage Distribution and Manufacturing Operations. Select the one to connect.

Entity use

This is the list of entities that are tax exempt based on specific factors, such as address. Most of these are delivered by Sage. You can upload additional entities if needed.

Entity use is linked to your customer and can determine if a customer or particular sale is tax exempt.

When you upload entities, new entities are active by default.

1. Select Entity use.
2. You receive confirmation that the entities are being loaded in the background.
   

When the process is complete, you can view the list on the Entity use page.

Tax codes

Avalara provides more the 3,000 tax codes, but you can filter the codes by description or name to upload only those that you use. You can upload or add codes at any time.

1. Select Tax codes.
2. In the Load tax codes from Avalara dialog box, enter your filter criteria. If you do not enter any criteria, all tax codes are uploaded from Avalara.
3. You can enter a range of tax code values.
4. You can enter a keyword or description to filter for tax code descriptions that contain that word or phrase.
5. Select Upload.

Define item-specific taxes

Depending on your business needs, you can add specific tax rates or categories to specific items on the Item tax page. After adding the codes here, you need to link the codes to the applicable item or items.

Create an Avalara tax item

1. Select Create.
2. Enter the tax ID you to want use. The ID needs to match the tax code ID in AvaTax.
3. Enter a description for your reference.
4. In the Item record on the Financial tab, select the Avalara tax item you want to apply.