Avalara AvaTax - Sales tax setup guide

Tyler MacDonald Updated by Tyler MacDonald

Sales Tax calculation is an important aspect of running a business and providing accuracy when generating transactions for a customer. Depending on where you find yourself in the world, assessing the right sales tax rate can be daunting. Avalara can address your sales tax challenges with AvaTax. It’s the fastest, easiest, most accurate and affordable way to calculate sales tax; manage exemption certificates; file returns; and remit payments across multiple tax regions. Avalara has a tax decision engine that determines rates based on 100,000+ taxability rules in 11,000+ taxing jurisdictions and instantly applies them to each transaction.

Here at shopVOX, we have created an integration with the Avalara platform to provide accurate sales tax rates.

Support for Avalara

Contact Avalara for any support requests, either via their support email or via this page. This software will not work unless you have a valid AvaTax account. To obtain the required account information, please contact your Avalara representative.

Setup instructions

  • Reach out to Avalara (your account manager at Avalara) to purchase the shopVOX connector
  • Setup your Avalara account (where you collect taxes, what you sell, etc).
  • When ready email support@shopvox.com to enable Avalara integration

Once we have activated the integration, you will have the option in Settings to get this setup.

Go to Settings —--> Accounting, locate and click on Avalara

On this page, enter your Account ID and License key.

The account number is found on your Avalara dashboard.

The License key is found in the settings section > License and API keys.

Update details in Quickbooks

To avoid the syncing errors while syncing from shopVOX to QBO, two things need to be added.

  1. Create a new Sales tax in QBO with the name Avalara-Tax.
  2. Create a Product with the name: Sales tax - Avalara by navigating in QBO >> Sales >> Product & Service

Update shopVOX Chart of Accounts mapping

After Quickbooks has been updated as noted above. The new Sales Tax name needs to be copied to shopVOX and then chosen in the Chart of Accounts mapping section.

Update Product list

Once you have connected your Avalara account, the next step is to add the product tax code to each Product.

  • Click on a Product
  • Click Advanced settings
  • Select the Tax code in the drop down menu
  • NOTE: You can type in key words and it will show available options

Exempt customer setup

If you have an exempt Customer who has already provided an exemption certificate to you,  you can enter the Exemption code by editing that Specific Customer .

Choose the appropriate option from the dropdown.

If you have sent a quote to a Customer and the Customer has since provided an Exemption Certificate, you will have to add the Exemption code as instructed above.

NOT: This will not automatically update the tax calculation on a transaction. You will need to go to the specific transaction for a transaction refresh.

To do so, go to the specific transaction, uncheck the taxable box from any of the charges and enable it back. This will refresh the tax calculation and the unchecked box can be checked back.

Before:
After:

Finding a customer in Avalara

If you are trying to locate a specific Customer in Avalara, you can find it using the string of letters and characters from the URL on the specific Customer page in your shopVOX account(see example below)

Transaction list in Avalara

How did we do?

Streamline In-Store Payments with with Stripe Terminal or USB Credit Card readers in shopVOX

Differences between USA QuickBooks Online and Non-USA QuickBooks Online

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