Calculating Tax on Billing Documents Using Avalara AvaTax

If your org is configured to use Avalara AvaTax to calculate tax on billing documents, you can calculate tax for a single billing document from its detail page or for multiple billing documents from the list view. Read Using Avalara AvaTax for Tax Calculation before calculating tax.

You can only calculate tax for billing documents with the status "Draft" or "Ready for Review" where the External Tax Status is not "Finalized".

After calculating a billing document's tax using Avalara AvaTax, if you make changes to the document that might impact its tax value, the document's External Tax Status changes from "Calculated" to "Not Calculated". The document's Tax Calculated checkbox is also cleared, indicating that tax needs calculating again. Some changes can indirectly impact a billing document's tax value but do not cause the External Tax Status to change to "Not Calculated" or clear the Tax Calculated checkbox, such as editing the Tax Exemption Status field on the Account.

Warning:

Calculating tax on a billing document might cause the document to be completed without warning. This happens if the Billing Central Automation feature is set up to automatically complete billing documents when their tax is calculated. Once a billing document's status is "Complete" you cannot commit its tax to Avalara AvaTax. Therefore if you want to commit tax manually, make sure the Billing Central Automation feature is not set up to automatically complete billing documents.

Calculating Tax for a Single Billing Document

To calculate tax for a single billing document using Avalara AvaTax:

  1. Click the Billing Documents tab.
  2. Click the Document Number of the billing document for which you want to calculate tax. You can only calculate tax for billing documents with the status "Draft" or "Ready for Review".
  3. Click Calculate Tax with Avalara. If you are using the enhanced Billing Document Detail page, click Calculate Tax | With Avalara.
  4. To confirm the action, click Calculate Tax.

Calculating Tax for Multiple Billing Documents

To calculate tax for multiple billing documents using Avalara AvaTax:

  1. Click the Billing Documents tab.
  2. Select the billing documents for which you want to calculate tax in the list view. You can only calculate tax for billing documents with the status "Draft" or "Ready for Review".
  3. Click Calculate Tax with Avalara. The Calculate Tax with Avalara page displays the number of billing documents that will be processed. The page also lists any invalid billing documents with a description of the error. Invalid documents are excluded from the process.
  4. Click Calculate Tax. The process starts in the background.

You can click View Background Process to monitor the progress. For more information, see Monitoring the Progress of a Background Process. If errors occur when processing multiple documents, contact your administrator to confirm that an appropriate scope size is set.

Calculating Tax Automatically

You can configure the Billing Central Automation feature to calculate tax automatically using Avalara AvaTax or FinancialForce's own internal tax calculation method, or using each company's default tax engine.

For more information about configuring the Billing Central Automation feature, see Setting up the Automation of Billing Central Processes.

Note:

The Billing Central Automation feature does not calculate tax for billing documents of type Credit Note.