Avalara AvaTax - Sales tax setup guide

Aaron Aldrich Updated by Aaron Aldrich

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. Our tax decision engine 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.

Getting started

Let's review the setup for linking this information to your account. The first step would be to sign up for an Avalara account.

Account creation

Here is the link to get started with your Avalara account - https://www.avalara.com/us/en/get-started.html

Second step to add this feature to your account is ask our support team to turn this on in your shopVOX account. You can use the chat support option or email support@shopvox.com

Support

For support with your AvaTax account, please visit avalara.com/technical-support. This software will not work unless you have a valid AvaTax account. To obtain the required account information, please contact your Avalara representative.

Installation

We will do most of the heavy lifting for you on this. Once you have an account created, our team can turn on this feature.

Once this is turned on, you will need to create a sales tax rate for Avalara.

Go to POS settings > Sales Tax > click New Sales Tax

Secondly, you will need to add your Avalara account details in Account settings > Settings > and scroll to the AvaTax Settings section.

How it works

Once you have this setup, the system will automatically look up the local sales tax rate and add it to the account if a new tax rate is found.

You can see in this screenshot that new sales tax rates are added based on the location of the transaction.

Setup detail for Products

When you have your Avalara account setup, you will also need to update all of your Products with a Tax Code.

What is a tax code?

Tax codes are the laws and rules that determine how items are taxed depending on the jurisdiction. 

Some products require special tax treatment. If you sell items such as clothing, food, software, medical supplies, software subscriptions, and freight, map them to Avalara tax codes to get the best sales tax rate for your customers.

Where do I go in shopVOX to do this?

From the Product page, select a Product. NOTE: This will need to be done with all of your products.

Click on the Edit button and go to bottom of the page. There is a field called Avalara Tax Code(see image below). Enter the tax code that fits this product. Here is a help guide written by Avalara on the steps to map your products to tax codes.

Setup For Tax Exempt

When you have your Avalara account setup, and you want to have a customer be Tax Exempt

1. Go to your Customer, and select "Edit"

2. Scroll down and Select "More Info"

3. Under more info, you will find "Avalara Entity use code", where you can select which exempt code you would like to use

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