Do you stop users from overriding tax liability? (Avalara question)

Kinetic ERP
1

I’m working on BPMs for this. My users cannot be trusted.

What I am not clear on is where invoices pull their address info that is presumably used for tax purposes. I know and/or assume:

  1. Shipment invoices:
    a. The shipment (further linked to the order/ship-to)
  2. Correction/cancellation/random CM of a shipment invoice:
    a. I should hope also the shipment/order
  3. Advance billing invoice:
    a. The order? Does Avalara ignore these? I feel like it does.
  4. Miscellaneous invoice that does not reference an order because we just felt like asking for money:
    a. Customer bill-to address??? Total guess here; have not investigated.
  5. Misc CM that does not reference an order because we just felt like giving away money:
    a. Same as 4, I assume?
  6. Other kinds?

If anyone has advice to share, it would be appreciated.

I’m going to put restrictions on Customer Ship-To and the OTS of sales orders.

But the invoices, that gets tricky. For shipment invoices, I figure I’ll just stop people from editing the tax liability altogether. If it’s wrong, fix the shipment or order, right? Don’t override it so as to not report the transaction to Avalara!

I did read this post, but it does not cover invoices.

2

Maybe I am overthinking this.

  1. Invoices do not contain addresses ever.
  2. Internal (intercompany) can have a blanket code to exempt those Customers from all reporting and taxes.
  3. International can be handled with the countries themselves (I had completely forgotten about that)

Therefore, get the country, customer, Ship To and order releases (OTS) right and that should cover it. Meaning:

  • Enforce Country to be non blank on orders and customer setup
  • Enforce Countries that are not US and Canada to use your international Liability code
  • Explain to people that Puerto Rico is part of the USA
  • Clean up any existing data
  • Do not allow editing of Tax Liability by the users ever. Not on invoices, not on orders, not on customers. Never.

Only issue could be a CM of an invoice that was messed up before…

3

Jason - Sounds like you’re on the right track.

Can you change log some fields and see who’s messing with things, and first train them, and then lock down their UI?

4

I appreciate the insight. And good point - I did not have as many fields logged as I needed to. I missed the whole ShipTo table.

5

Some more thoughts.

  1. Quotes! Bah! I re-read your post @askulte and you mentioned quotes but I always forget about those. Should be as simple as blocking the Tax Liability field, though.
  2. ShipTo table has a string field for Country and a CountryNum. 99% of ours are in sync, but not all - We must have overrode it with DMT or something back in the day.
  3. As I was fixing those, I found another fun thing.
    a. Background: I set all Countries except US and Canada to an INTL Liability code; US/CA are blank
    b. If I am editing a Ship-To, and I switch the country to India, for example, it switches the Liability to my INTL code. Great.
    c. But if I then switch that same one to USA, it stays on INTL, rather than go to blank. Booooo. So now I need to work on the BPM some more.

I have an upgrade to prep for, so what I have will need to be good enough till October. It’s better than the nothing we had.

6

These questions ended up being useless for the root question in this post. But…

…both came up recently so I thought I’d share.

First, advance billing invoices do not get sent to Avalara. There is an old thread on here about that, but I investigated anyway and the “Tax Type” (which does not always exist at the outset) is locked on the advance billing setting, so I have to concur there.

Second, miscellaneous invoice lines. The tax is tied to the ship-to address in the one-time shipping area. But it’s not a shipment, you say? Apparently you can still edit it.