Using Avalara AvaTax for Tax Calculation

To use Avalara AvaTax to calculate tax on billing documents, your administrator must first complete the setup in Setting up Tax Calculation Using Avalara AvaTax and your permissions must include the Billing Central - Billing Document - Avalara permission set.

Then before calculating tax for a billing document, you must ensure that:

1. Your billing document has a company, an account, and one or more billing document line items.
2. The addresses of the following records are valid:
   • The account and company associated with the billing document
   • The shipping account and company site associated with the billing document line items

   See Validating Addresses for Sales and Use Tax Calculation.

   If you have entered shipping addresses manually on line items, you can check that the address details are accurate on the US Postal Service website.

Note:

The tax value calculated by Avalara AvaTax replaces any tax values that you have entered manually on the billing document, or calculated using FinancialForce's internal tax calculation method.

For instructions on how to calculate tax, see Calculating Tax on Billing Documents Using Avalara AvaTax.

In addition to calculating tax using Avalara AvaTax you might have permission to commit tax. For information about committing tax, see Committing Tax on Billing Documents Using Avalara AvaTax.

Using Avalara AvaTax for Tax Calculation on Credit Notes

If you want to use Avalara AvaTax to calculate and commit tax on credit notes, you can use Billing Central's Convert to Credit Note feature but you must first configure it to create credit notes with the status "Ready for Review" rather than "Complete". For more information, see Convert to Credit Note Overview.

Alternatively you can create credit notes manually by creating a billing document with its Document Type set to Credit Note. You can then calculate and commit its tax as explained in the related topics.

Note:

When you commit a credit note's tax, Avalara AvaTax stores the transaction as a Return Invoice and its values are treated as negative amounts.

Viewing Tax Breakdown by Jurisdiction

If you specified that you want to automatically create tax breakdown records, these are available to view when tax has been calculated successfully. You can view these records from the Tax Jurisdiction Breakdown related list on a billing document or a billing document line item.

In some circumstances, tax breakdown records are processed in a queue, for example, if your billing document contains a large amount of line items. If your org is set up to process records in a queue, you will be notified when tax breakdown records have been created.