We are a long-time Avalara customer trying to optimize our system setup, and could use some advice. We are 100% US based operation with sites in 4 states. Maybe 5% of our orders ship to international customers.
Back in the day (pre Wayfair Supreme Court decision), we only collected sales tax in a handful of states. Back then it was common practice to set the Tax Liability field on orders/invoices to “Avalara” for states you collect taxes in and set Tax Liability to something like “Not Taxable” for addresses you don’t collect taxes in (and then in Tax Liability setup you tell the system that “Not Taxable” doesn’t connect to Avalara). This would save transaction fees when you didn’t need to ping Avalara.
However, doing that required a bunch of BPMs / customizations and was never really air-tight. It all worked in the “standard workflow” where people do things in a linear fashion, but broke down when people would copy old quotes / orders or toggle between different addresses or use different addresses at the header and release levels (and fail to answer the UI prompts correctly when the system asks if they want to push header level Tax Liability down to the Release level). Etc., etc.
Fast forward to 2025 - we now collect sales tax in all 50 states. I’ve been able to remove a ton of legacy junk code that tries to fiddle with the Tax Liability field. We now use base Epicor functionality that sets Tax Liability to “Avalara” for US addresses and sets it to “International” for non-US addresses (this is configured in Country Maintenance where you tie a Tax Liability to a Country).
But it’s still not air-tight!! Epicor functionality basically sets defaults appropriately but doesn’t stop users from overriding it erroneously or responding to the header/release pushdown UI prompts incorrectly. And we still have quirks with copying old quotes / orders.
I am at the point now where I just want to remove the “International” Tax Liability option entirely so that everything is “Avalara”, even international addresses where we don’t collect tax. I understand that our fees could increase by pinging Avalara when we don’t need to, but probably worth it to get past all the quirks and custom code once and for all.
Any advice on this? Are there any gotchas to sending international addresses through Avalara when we don’t collect international tax?