Sending Transaction Data to Avalara VAT Reporting

Transaction data is sent to Avalara VAT Reporting on a recurring basis using a scheduled job.

Note:

Your administrator must set up the recurring job. For more information, see Scheduling Avalara VAT Reporting Batch Jobs.

The scheduled job starts a background process. The process first generates XML documents that contain the eligible transaction records and then sends the documents to the storage server.

Transactions are eligible for sending to Avalara VAT Reporting if they:

  • Are linked to a sales invoice, sales credit note, payable invoice, payable credit note, or billing document record.
  • Have the Avalara VAT Reporting Status field set to "Ready for Sending" or "Sending Failed".
  • Have at least one tax line item.

A single XML document can contain multiple transactions, as defined in the Avalara VAT Reporting Scope Size field on the Accounting Settings custom setting. By default, this is set to 75. For more information on changing this setting, see Accounting Settings.

While generating the XML document, all the transactions and their related records are validated against the predefined mappings. If a transaction is invalid, it is not added to the XML document and its Avalara VAT Reporting Status is set to "Validation Error". This can happen if a related record has a blank value for a required field. For example, if an account linked to a transaction doesn't have the Tax Registration Number field populated. For more information on how to fix an invalid transaction, see Manually Changing the Avalara VAT Reporting Status of a Transaction.

After all the transactions are processed, the valid transactions are added to the XML document. Data is transformed to XML format using the predefined mappings. The mappings are defined in the Avalara VAT Reporting Integration record. The record is a Foundations Configuration Item custom metadata type record. For more information on mappings, see About the Avalara VAT Reporting Mappings.

Once all the XML documents are generated, they are sent to the AWS storage server and the Avalara VAT Reporting Status field is set to "Sent to Avalara VAT Reporting". If an error occurs while connecting to the storage server, the status of the transaction is set to "Sending Failed".

An email notification is also sent to the user who created the scheduled task. The email contains a link to the related Avalara VAT Reporting batch record.