Link My Avalara Account

Avalara AvaTax is a cloud-based solution automating transaction tax calculations and the tax filing process. Avalara provides real-time tax calculation using tax content from more than 12,000 US taxing jurisdictions and over 200 countries, insuring your transaction tax is calculated based on the most current tax rules.

If you are using Avalara tax codes, there occasionally will be situations where tax is only charged on a percentage of the total amount taxable. If you have questions about using a particular tax code in Advanced Billing, and why the tax amount is not as expected -- please double check how much of the purchase qualifies for taxing.

Avalara Obtained Certifications:

Before we delve into how to connect your existing Avalara account to Advanced Billing, it’s important to ensure that merchants are aware of the rules surrounding taxing subscribers.

A few items must be in place within Advanced Billing to create a situation where tax is generated:

The product (address required) or component must be taxable
Your tax origin address / settings must be complete
A subscriber must provide a full billing or shipping address

Additionally, within Avalara:

Configure which countries and states are taxable

Creating Taxable Subscriptions

In order for a subscription to be considered taxable, the subscription must have a valid shipping or billing address. The address information must be complete, and be formatted properly in order to correctly determine the tax locale of the charge.

Full Address Required for Taxable Subscriptions

When using Avalara, Advanced Billing requires that you use complete addresses in order for your subscriber to be taxed appropriately. Partial addresses, such as country and zip code, are not acceptable as valid addresses in order to derive tax information from Avalara. The result of supplying partial addresses will be that your subscribers are not charged tax.

A complete address includes the following:

Address 1 (50 characters maximum)
Address 2 (optional, use when appropriate)
City
State (Required ISO format, see below)
Country (Required ISO format, see below)
Postal Code / Zip (11 characters maximum)

Required Country Format for Taxable Subscriptions

Advanced Billing requires that you use the ISO standard country codes when designating the subscriber's taxable location.

Countries should be formatted as 2 characters. For more information, please see the following wikipedia article on ISO_3166-1.

Required State Format for Taxable Subscriptions

Advanced Billing requires that you use the ISO standard state codes when designating the subscriber's taxable location.

US states (2 characters): ISO_3166-2
States outside the US (2-3 characters): To find the correct state codes outside of the US, please go to ISO_3166-1 and click on the link in the “ISO 3166-2 codes” column next to country you wish to populate.

Creating Taxable Products

In order for your products to be taxable, you must ensure they are set up properly in Advanced Billing. Please familiarize yourself with special considerations for setting up taxable products in Advanced Billing here.

If any settings are configured in Avalara to specify a particular product id as taxable, they will be ignored. Advanced Billing acts as the main location for controlling taxable products and defining the nature of the tax.

Configuring Taxable Jurisdictions

Unlike other tax features in Advanced Billing, where the taxable countries and states are configured inside Advanced Billing, this integration requires your team to configure this information inside Avalara. Go to Settings > Where you collect tax to fill this information.

Choosing the taxable jurisdictions is entirely dependent on your particular company’s needs. For any questions, we recommend contacting a tax professional. Avalara’s support is available as well for any questions on particular tax codes.

Connect to AvaTax

Find your AvaTax Credentials

If you receive the error message "Invalid Credentials" with a recently generated license key, please wait 5 minutes and try again. When generating a license key within Avalara, it may take up to 5 minutes for the key to become available for usage.

In order to connect to Avalara you need to obtain account ID and license key. Please refer to Avalara FAQ for finding account id and license key.

Enable AvaTax for Advanced Billing Site

Find “Link My Avalara Account” panel and click “Get Started” button.

Go to Config / Taxes in the navigation panel.

Enter your Avalara account id and license key and press "Validate Avalara Account".

After providing valid credentials a modal will appear with list of your Avalara companies. Please select which one you want to connect with in Advanced Billing. At the top you can view if your Avalara account is in production or sandbox mode.

In order to commit transactions to Avalara you need to select “Post documents to Avalara checkbox.” You can change this option later.

If you haven’t setup Tax Origin Address before you will need to provide your business’s address. If you had - please validate it. Avalara needs a full address on file to calculate the correct tax rates.

As a last step, please select tax destination address. To learn more please check our Tax Settings page.

After filling out the form, save changes by clicking "Set My Tax Origin Address" button

Post documents to Avalara

Enabled: Enables tax document submission to Avalara’s AvaTax service for record keeping. With this setting enabled, transactions will be posted and committed to the AvaTax Admin Console which will allow you to gain access to reporting, tax filing, and other services from Avalara. Invoices for zero (or fully discounted) amounts will not be posted. Please be aware that Avalara charges more when you post documents. This may increase your Avalara bill.

The documents that are synced to Avalara include open/unpaid and nontaxable invoices, as well as refunds. For subscribers that are in a group, we will only sync segment / child invoices and not the corresponding consolidated invoice.

Disabled: Advanced Billing will send only tax calculations to Avalara. No transactions will be saved in Avalara.

Example screen displaying Avalara enabled

Change Avalara credentials or company

In order to change credentials (ie. from sandbox to production) click the Edit button. You will be able to change account credentials or select another company.

Invoice Billing Mappings between Advanced Billing and Avalara

The following section deals with mappings in Avalara only if you are utilizing classic invoice billing in Advanced Billing. If you are using Relationship Invoicing with Advanced Billing, please locate the mapping section below that deals with Relationship Invoicing.

Payments mapping

From (Advanced Billing)	Prefix	To (Avalara)
Transaction ID	CHARGIFY-PAYMENT	DOCUMENT CODE
Statement ID	CHARGIFY-STATEMENT	REFERENCE CODE
Customer ID	N/A	CUSTOMER

Charge (Prepaid) mapping

This will occur if automatic billing has been selected. If there is a current negative balance (credit) on the subscription, this pre-paid charge – covered by the existing credit will be applied to the full cost of a all statement’s charges. This will be marked in Avalara as prepaid using Record External Payment or Adjust Balance options.

Charges (Prepaid) sync happen during subscription renewal (at the end of period)

From (Advanced Billing)	Prefix	To (Avalara)
Transaction ID	CHARGIFY-PREPAID-CHARGE-{charge_id}	DOCUMENT CODE
Statement ID	CHARGIFY-STATEMENT	REFERENCE CODE
Customer ID	N/A	CUSTOMER

Invoices mapping

From (Advanced Billing)	Prefix	To (Avalara)
Subscription ID and Invoice ID	CHARGIFY-SUB-{subscription_id}-INV-{invoice_id}	DOCUMENT CODE
Unpaid (Status)		Saved
Paid (Status)		Committed
Customer ID		CUSTOMER
Reference Code	N/A	Not used

Refunds mapping

From (Advanced Billing)	Prefix	To (Avalara)	Notes
Refund ID	CHARGIFY-REFUND-	DOCUMENT CODE
Payment ID	CHARGIFY-PAYMENT-	REFERENCE CODE
Invoice ID	CHARGIFY-SUB-{subscription_id}-INV-{invoice_id}	REFERENCE CODE	Applicable if refunded payment is related to invoice
Customer ID		CUSTOMER

Line item mapping

From (Advanced Billing)	Prefix	To (Avalara)	Notes
Product ID	Product-{product_id}	ITEM
Component ID	Component-{component_id}	ITEM
Product name	CHARGIFY-SUB-{subscription_id}-INV-{invoice_id}	ITEM DESCRIPTION	With subscription date or to component name field
Product Tax Type		TAX CODE
Component Tax Type		TAX CODE
Tax Origin Address		ORIGIN ADDRESS
Billing Address or Shipping Address		DESTINATION ADDRESS

Relationship Invoicing Mapping between Advanced Billing and Avalara

The following section deals with mappings from Advanced Billing to Avalara only if you are utilizing Relationship Invoice billing in Advanced Billing. For more information on Relationship Invoicing, please see our documentation that covers the broader topic of this style of invoicing.</a>

Invoices mapping

For Relationship Invoicing only:

From (Advanced Billing)	Prefix	To (Avalara)	Notes
Subscription ID & Invoice ID	CHARGIFY-CENTRIC-SUB-{subscription_id}-INV-{invoice_id}	DOCUMENT CODE
Unpaid (Status)		Saved
Paid (Status)		Committed
Voided (Status)		Canceled
Canceled		Uncommitted
REFERENCE CODE	SUBSCRIPTION-GROUP-ID-{subscription_group_uid}, PARENT-INV-NUM-{parent_invoice_number}	Applicable if invoice segment
Customer ID		CUSTOMER

Credit Notes mapping

For Relationship Invoicing only:

Credit notes sync occurs when they get created. It happens when invoice receive credit notes from prorated credits, refunds, manually applied service credits and voiding partially paid invoices operations.

From (Advanced Billing)	Prefix	To (Avalara)	Notes
Credit note ID & Subscription ID	CHARGIFY-CENTRIC-SUB-{subscription_id}-CN-{credit_note_id}	DOCUMENT CODE
Status		Committed	Always
Invoice IDs	CHARGIFY-CENTRIC-SUB-{subscription_id}-INV-{invoice_id}	REFERENCE CODE	Origin invoices that were credited that were credited or refunded
Customer ID		CUSTOMER

Line item mapping

Here we follow the same mapping patterns as for Invoice Billing