Avalara connectors

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Connectors for Avalara

Optimizely Configured Commerce integration with the Avalara Tax Calculator places the power of the Avalara Tax Calculator on your site. Avalara Tax Calculator includes the following features:

  • Identifies product taxability
  • Applies current, most up-to-date tax rules and regulations
  • Verifies tax holiday status
  • Applies sourcing rules (where taxable)

More information about the Avalara Tax Calculator product can be found at the Avalara website.

Prerequisites

To successfully implement the Avalara Tax Calculator for a Configured Commerce website, an Avalara AvaTax API account needs to be set up and configured. For help with this, reference Avalara's "Getting Started" guide for developers: AvaTax Developer Guide

Enable and Configure Avalara as the Tax Calculator

Settings

  1. Go to Admin Console > Administration > System > Settings
  2. Search for Tax Calculator.
  3. Select Avalara from the menu.
  4. After selecting Avalara, a list of additional fields, under the heading of Avalara Tax Calculator, will display. These settings are described both below and within Admin Console:
Setting Name

Description/Notes

Company Code

 The Company Code is created when creating an Organization within the Avalara account. This Code is used by Configured Commerce when calling the Avalara API to point to a particular organization.

Discount Freight On Order

 If True, the freight discount will be added to the total order discount for tax calculations. Freight charges should be taxable based on configuration settings in Avalara. The freight discount will only have a value when a promotion with result type "Discount Amount Off Shipping" or "Discount Percent Off Shipping" is applied.

Freight Tax Code

 The setting value in this field is added to the freight line in taxRequest as TaxCode. Based on Avalara, the Tax Code is a unique identifier associated with items or tax rules to create custom taxing situations.

Account

The account number for your Avalara account. This will be a ten digit number.

This information is provided by Avalara

License Key

The license key required to connect to Avalara. This is a 16 character string provided by Avalara

Send Live Transactions

Determines if tax will be calculated using the development server or the live server. Default value: No

Post Taxes on Order Submit

If Yes, taxes will be posted to Avalara on order submit. Default value: No
Log Transactions If enabled, transaction logs will be saved to the application log to assist with troubleshooting. To prevent large numbers of application logs this should only be used for debugging purposes. It will capture the call context, time of the request and the response. Default is value is No
The following are general tax settings found under the Taxes section heading:
Setting Description
Ship Code for Store Pickup Calculations The ship via code defined here will determine if the order is a store pickup. If it is, taxes will be based on the store's address rather than the ship to address.
State for Store Pickup Calculations If the order is being picked up at a store, as defined by the ship via code, this is used to determine which state that will be used to calculate state tax.
Store Pickup Postal Code If the order is being picked up at a store, as defined by the ship via code, this is used to determine which tax locality to use to calculate local tax.

Use Order Warehouse for Tax Origin Address

 If Yes, the address of the default warehouse will be used to determine the tax rate for the order. If No, the website's company address will be used. Default is No.
Non-Exempt Customer Tax Code

If a value is given for this setting, only customers with this value as their tax code will have taxes calculated.

This setting was deprecated as of version 4.4. Review the related article on upgrading to version 4.4, as adjustments to the settings and code are required.
The following settings are no longer applicable, as Avalara does not require them.
Setting Description

UserName

The field is no longer used by Avalara and was removed from the Admin Console in version 4.4.

Password

The field is no longer used by Avalara and was removed from the Admin Console in version 4.4.

Tax codes can be assigned to customers and/or products. There are numerous business and legal reasons to apply tax codes, so we will leave making those decisions up to you. Avalara does provide a default set of specific tax codes (https://developer.avalara.com/avatax/dev-guide/product-taxability) that can be used or you can simply use the NT (non-taxable) tax code indicate a customer or product is not taxable. Once the tax codes have been identified, use the following steps to apply the codes to the relevant customers or products. This can be done manually, as shown below, as a part of a customer or product import, or the codes are assigned within your ERP and would be brought in as a part of a product integration job.

Avalara calculates taxes for the customer based on the Ship To customer record (not the Bill To). To use the NT (non-taxable) code, it must be entered into the Tax Code field of the Ship To record.

Enter the tax code for products

  1. Admin Console > Catalog > Products.
  2. Click Edit for the desired product.
  3. Click the Details finger tab.
  4. Scroll down to the Tax Information section.
  5. Enter the tax code in the Tax Code 1 field (the Tax Code 2 field is only used in association with the Dual Tax Calculator).
  6. Click Save.

Enter the tax code for customers

  1. Admin Console > Catalog > Customers.
  2. Click Edit for the desired customer.
  3. Click the Details finger tab.
  4. Scroll down to the Billing section.
  5. Enter the tax code in the Tax Code field.
  6. Click Save.

Access the Avalara website for admin functions

Below are the URLs for manually accessing the Avalara website for Admin Functions: