I was wondering what the Epicor side of Tax Connect looks like. We got a demo of the Avalara website, but they declined to show us a single Epicor screen or workflow, anything. Basically they said you’ll upload certs to our website and then Epicor will magically charge taxes.
What happens when you have garbage addresses (which we have a ton, since we ship to mines, lots, etc)? Do you hit some kind of roadblock in Epicor?
How are customer ID’s matched to the certs? Are there really no Avalara screens in Epicor?
Address accuracy is very important, specifically the state and I think zip code (apologies UK person trying to understand US state taxation).
You also need to set up tax codes, based upon Avalara codes and define a default tax code for products and then define any exceptions at the part level.
With these set up the taxes are generated at the point of order entry. One useful feature is the ability to see the tax breakdown generated by Avalara.
This is useful if you need to explain the tax amount to the customer.
In terms of process, you need to load your registration and exemptions into Avalara, as this is how Avalara determines whether or not to calculate tax for a customer in a state.
All in all it was a very straightforward implementation and now we are using it, I can’t imagine how any company of a certain size with a lot of customers across different states functions without using Avalara.
My advice is not to focus too much on the Epicor side of things, but make sure you fully understand what you need to do from the Avalara side of things in terms of registrations, exemptions, filing and paying returns and also understanding the reports that are available from within Avalara.
We have a physical file folder with 200-300 paper exemptions… They make it sound like we will have to scan each one in, upload it, and then make sure the OCR worked for each one. Did you have to do something like that? Its going to be quite a time sink.
If state and zip code are all it needs, we should be OK. Its mostly the house numbers that are imaginary for us.
Tax Connect (Avalara) also includes address validation but it’s not automatic the user must go to Actions - Tax Connect - Validate Address as seen in second screen shot @aclements post above. That feature is available in Customer Entry, Order Entry, etc.
Accounting did this for us, but basically yes, I think so.
So, there are about 25-30 states that have this joint committee on tax exemptions or whatever, but the point is, they all use one form. With Avalara’s site, you can upload that form and say “this applies to the following states for us.”
But otherwise, yeah I think you are typing A LOT by hand.
But that’s really all the setup we have to do right? All our product would be the same tax category, so I don’t think we would have to do much setup for parts.
You can mark customers as non-taxable manually by linking the customer’s tax region code to a non-taxable region, but this bypasses any value added logic Avalara adds (like expiring certs). It also bypasses Avalara’s surcharge for managing that exemption cert We use Avalara for customer exemptions, but the tax region for internal non-taxable purchases.
We’ve got ours set-up to validate addresses automatically (I believe via a customization, would have to check…).
I’m curious, do you remember about how long it took per the number of certs you had? Trying to get an idea if it would be a 1 week implementation or a 6 month implementation.
First of all, any time spent getting Avalara set up is absolutely worth it. It really is ‘magical’ once implemented.
When we went live with Avalara, they assigned us an implementation specialist who helped us with the integration and it was very seamless. They provided us with an import file that we were able to use to import customer exemption information. A lot of this can be extracted from your ERP. This does NOT have to all be manually entered or OCR’d. Avalara Customer Import File.xlsx (23.3 KB)
In terms of uploading certificates to Avalara, it is my understanding that this is optional. There are two different Avalara products. AvaTax which does the ‘magical’ transactional and reporting work. Then there is ECM Pro (Exemption Certificate Management) that is used to manage customer exemptions certificates.
With ECM Pro you can basically attached the customer’s certificate to the exemption that you created in AvaTax. Hoping that helps/makes sense.
Back to my first point, it’s 100% worth it. We’ve been extremely happy with Avalara so far.
As far as the Cert uploads @Banderson did an Insights presentation how they made it possible to upload certs from Epicor. If you dont use Epicor you use the Avalara portal I believe. It does come with a development sandbox too.
We actually pulled down the certs from Avalara into Epicor so our users could see them without having to log into avalara. We have our customers manage their own certs. When we get questions from them, it’s usually because they got charged tax and they shouldn’t have. But if their cert expired, it’s on them.
We use the Avatax module for Kinetic and as explained above the setup is fairly straightforward. The addresses here are extremely important, the west side of a street could have a different tax code than the east.
I would question what you have to do to manage your certificates. The OCR process I found lacking. There is a limited list of OCR forms that read in where the data is scraped correctly. For us that was less than 20% of the total. We do not use Certificate software. I would also caution you on the amount of calls to Avatax that Epicor generates. We changed our process here to lower the amount. We would Ready to Fulfill orders multiple times and send acknowledgements due to customer changes and we ran up quite a bill.
After implementation I would check the Avalara site for your call totals by week.
wait, can you explain that more? We were given a price for x amount of invoices, x amount of cert captures, and x amount of tax returns. It sounds like you are saying we get charged for every tax calculation, address check, etc?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3rKrNhWGPoE is a video on understanding their billing. I would be curious to know how the users that have automatic address verification turned on how many calls that is generating?
By default Epicor Tax Connect sends all sales order lines to Avalara for which the Ready To Process check box is selected on Sales Order Entry and it sends all AR invoice lines to Avalara for which the Ready To Calculate check box is selected on AR Invoice Entry. To start, I suggest you review our knowledge article KB0036881: Knowledge Article KB0036881 - Minimizing Tax Connect tax calculation usage
We use Avalara for customer exemptions, but the tax region for internal non-taxable purchases.
