I mean just imagine paying for an Epicor Maintenance Plan and Avalara and they tell you to hire a Consulting firm to address it (automate it)…
This isnt a simple BPM… You must Use BO’s and lets say if you do it on the Order, you have to do it on OnChangeCustomer or OnChangeShipTo and if your sales-rep accidently picks the wrong ShipTo you must delete the charge, so it doesnt get added to a non-colorado ShipTo etc. etc.
You also must prevent the user from deleting it . . .
If you are converting Quotes to Orders then you must do it on the Quote to Order BPMs… What about OTS? what about…
Epicor should provide a BPM you can download where they figured out the whole flow.
I think the Colorado Fee was enacted back in 2021. They had plenty of time I’ll do it for 1000$ and then you can invoice Epicor
Note to myself - Also need to add logic to check if the customer is taxable. If tax-exempt, then no RDF misc header charge gets added…
Since we’re paying extra for Avalara to manage our customer’s sales tax exemption certificates, the BPM/Function now has to go out to Avalara and see if the customer is tax exempt.
If the Colorado Retail Delivery Fee affects your company (i.e. you sell parts to taxable customers in Colorado), please put in an EpiCare ticket & ask for BPM guidance.
So far they say only a handful have requested it, so it’s would be a one-off consulting job for the Custom Solutions Group, and not something that they feel should be provided as part of our Epicor and Avalara maintenance. I’ll update this post if it changes…
Does anyone have BPM’s set up & can share the code? As a low-coder, creating the misc header line for sales orders is challenging, and I really hope we don’t need to have our sales team do this manually until I learn to do this… I’m willing to pay consulting $ to get this done today if necessary, and will share what we do with this group…
@aosemwengie1 - Thanks for submitting the idea! I removed votes from some of my other ideas to free them up to vote on this one. Please add comments too. So far Epicor believes only a handful of customers are affected. If everyone votes and/or comments, they can get a better scope.
Here’s what I commented:
This is necessary ASAP! Avalara already knows which customers are in Colorado and are not tax exempt, so it should process the tax automatically. Every company running Epicor that sells products to Colorado customers is impacted.
To get a true count, Avalara can query it’s own data and sum all active Avalara-Epicor customers that had a Colorado sales tax return with a shipping line in the past year. I’d expect hundreds.
Epicor and Avalara have know about this for a year, and should provide the BPM’s (or at least a document with the steps to create one & the code) to customers upon request. It doesn’t make sense to have hundreds of Epicor customers paying maintenance to all develop the same solution. I’m sure other states will follow with similar requirements in the future as well.
BPM’s will apply to Quote Entry, Order Entry, and Quote to Order conversions. When a customer ship-to state is in Colorado, create the misc header charge or line for the Colorado Retail Delivery Fee. If the shipto changes to non-Colorado, remove the line.
We are lucky in that this doesn’t apply to us but at a previous gig, they used AdvancedWare’s Sales Tax module. I understood it is way less expensive than Alavara. Do any AdvancedWare users know if they are handling the fee properly? If Epicor/Alavara cannot provide the service, it may be worth looking at other solutions.
I haven’t figured out the answer yet, but I’m thinking I need to capture the event when avalara comes back and applies the tax code to the order release for colorado’s delivery fee to avoid having to rewrite all their logic to figure out that it applies. But that event isn’t going to occur until the ready to process box is checked. Then I have to figure out how to add the delivery fee part to the order automatically (or remove it, if the ship to address is changed and the delivery fee does not apply anymore). This is not trivial to automate so I share your frustration with Epicor’s cavalier attitude about it, and I hope a lot of people comment on the idea so they take some action on this.
Mark, Epicor/Avalara’s hacky solution is to add a $0 line to the order (or line 0 = misc header charge), and then the Avalara sales tax engine will add the $.27 fee as part of the tax. Avalara will also do the sales tax return also. We just think that Epicor should provide the BPM’s to handle this automatically, instead of having salespeople remember to add/remove this charge on CO shipto’s manually, or asking hundreds of Epicor customers to develop their own bpm’s.
I’d be happy if Avalara just did it on their end as part of sales tax automatically. They have the Colorado customer shipto, can tell if it’s a taxable customer, and can see there is a freight line. Then all we need to do is show the fee on the invoice to be fully compliant.
The part that kills me is that if this fee had been in effect last year, we would have remitted all of $6 to the state of Colorado. $6!!! Meanwhile we are already into the hundreds and will surely pass $1000 in labor trying to sort this mess out.
What happens if you eat the fee internally? Run a report at the end of the month to get data for your Colorado return, and then submit that $.54 after the fact? Have the company eat the CoRDF fee instead of passing it on to the customer, and don’t invoice the customer? I checked our numbers, and we’d be around $350 a year. I’d love to write them a check instead of this mess.
@askulte I can probably throw a quick BPM together for you to do this, can you tell me what scenario / conditions this should apply? Also what Misc Code ID you want to use?
@josecgomez - that would be amazing! As if we don’t owe you enough for creating and maintaining this forum with Bryan.
For the BPM, the Priority Need (covers 90% of scenarios): Add a misc header charge of ‘CORD’ when the order’s initial or changed shipto.state or OTSState = CO and OrderHed.DocTotalTax > 0. Hopefully it’s lightweight if it’s being triggered multiple times (I have mine on SalesOrder.Update, and was working on catching the initial customer, and shipto, but excluding if no changes were made).
Wish #2 - The BPM would delete misc header charge line ‘CORD’ if the ShipTo.State changes and != CO.
Wish #3 - Also applies to Quotes & Quotes converted to orders, but we can live without that (and I can copy what you did for #1 and apply it there).
Wish #4 - Refine it so only taxable customers get the line added (We can live without this, though. If non-taxable CO customers get the ‘CORD’ line, but don’t get taxed, that’s not the worst). We pay extra already to Avalara to manage our customer’s tax exempt certs.
My (lack of) progress so far: I followed Epicor’s KB article, and created a $0 Misc Charge part of ‘CORD’, added ‘CORD’ to Avalara and set the tax code. Then I manually added ‘CORD’ to a test order, set Ready to Process, and saved it. Avalara calculated sales tax, but still did not include the RDF, so I notified EpiCare on that too.
Has anyone had luck getting their tests to asses the fee?
