Our new company has a large portion of B2C that we do not. We are looking to use Avalara to calculate the sales tax. Anyone using Kinetic for say 300 b2C customers daily where you are calculating sales tax. How does avalara function? How does it respond on an order taking side. What concerns should be look for? What is the setup and config like?
Alternatively do others not use Avalara and if not, how do you handle sales tax calculation with a larger order load? Our current company has a handful a month and we calculate manually.
Yes we use it for all of our customers. Once you set it up you don’t have to do anything - the sales tax automatically calculates when you click Ready to Process in sales order entry (or alternatively, if you have ready to process defaulting to true, then the sales tax calculates every time you change something on the order). And it recalculates the sales tax again on invoicing. Avalara has a ton of functionality so its kind of hard to answer this question - it’s a pretty standard solution and it works fine.
Make sure Order entry folks verify the address. If a bad address is used then the invoicing won’t proceed. This requires un-shipping the packer, correcting the ship to info, re-shipping. Then you can invoice properly.
Another word of advice, API calls to Avalara. This was the biggest surprise to us. It’s hard to understand where they all come from and how to control them. We’re an ECC user as well and the quantity of API calls that are sent to Avalara can be staggering. Avalara has a formula on how they charge for API calls. Be sure to try and understand that.
Other than that, it’s fantastic. Like stated above, once setup, it works great. They can even handle the tax filing if you want.
For more information regarding Avalara’s transaction calculations, including API calls to their tax calculation and address validation services, check out their published "AvaTax Supplemental Terms” webpage.