+1 for Avalara. It just works.
One module thats not half-ass baked 
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?
This 10000000000%. Avalara has never been wrong in the 10+ years of working with them.
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
You may find the following helpful, too.
I see, nothing was mentioned about about transactions. I specifically asked if address validations costed anything and they said no, that’s covered in the cost of an invoice. I feel like the sales person was a bit shady. They quoted us a cost based on the number of invoices we produce per year, but from what you guys are saying it should probably be 3-5X that number…
I wouldn’t say shady they assume per invoice a set number of “transactions”. Let’s say it’s 3 per invoice so that’d cover address validation and tax estimates at the Quote & Order levels. Compared to the cost of having a dedicated employee responsible for just keeping up with the tax codes
and rates across all the states, counties, and local authorities Avalara is a bargain.
I suppose shady implies some level of malice, but its incompetent that they couldn’t have played the 2 minute video posted here or mentioned that “invoices” just means 10 API transactions. There was no way to know that having “ready to process” checked might rack up tons of charges for example, as I thought they literally meant you get charged per invoice not a less than transparent API call count. Especially when I asked if Address Validation incurred any charges.
Thankfully I am getting better information from people offering their time for free here 
Unless you’re toggling “Ready to Process” on the same sales order multiple times I don’t see a big problem. Yes, they could be more clear that their quote included 15 API hits per invoice but their estimate to what we were charged was accurate. If you have a big growth year and are invoicing much higher than the number you gave them, they’ll let you know if you’re nearing your API level and can work out an overage or going to another tier.
Caveat emptor!
I’ve also heard somewhere… “And we’ve been poisoned by these fairy tales. The lawyers clean up all details.”
Another caveat is that as you are adding lines, it will make a call for each previous lines if you have ready to process checked (dumb tax laws necessitate this). That means if you are importing lines with say, paste insert, the calls being made will grow exponentially as you add lines. So make sure you don’t have ready to process checked until you are actually done with a large order. It causes other problems besides just the calls to avalara too, but is exacerbated by these calls.
We don’t set “Ready to Process” until after the order lines, shipto, etc is all done and order is ready to be released to manufacturing.
Is an API call made per Quote / Sales Order / Invoice line? Or per Quote / Order / Invoice?
If there’s a 100 line quote, which turns into an order, and then gets invoiced, is that 300 calls, which gets billed as 300/10 = 30 ‘invoices’?
If that’s the case, I can see why our Avalara bill is so huge!
If I look at the change log for the sales order header, you can see the amount grows with each line as Avalara adds tax.
Has anyone done reporting to help reconcile the Avalara statement against Epicor’s Quote/Order/Invoice history? We can total Q/O/I per month from Epicor, but it’d be interesting to audit and make sure it’s what we think it should be…
Right, even editing lines.
Real life story from this past Saturday:
The order was 60 lines, I believe. So it validated all 60 every time until I turned off Ready-To-Process.
On that note:
Whoops! Definitely misunderstood this… Thanks for catching!
One big warning for new implementations. There is an option somewhere to do a Mass Address Validation - DON’T DO IT.
Our consultant (Epicor Professional Services) told us to validate all addresses, and that generated $4500 in junk fees. Avalara found all 8000 customers and 10,000 Ship-Tos in our database, and ran them through the USPS verification for no good reason. Most are never going to order anything ever, over half are international addresses that have absolutely possibility of validating with USPS. If you do address validation at the time of order one by one, the costs are insignificant.
Another caveat - if you happen to do a lot of International sales, Avalara will charge more junk fees to tell you that no sales tax is due when shipping out of country (Duh). The Epicor Professional Services did not think to tell us that. We eventually ended up using the Tax Liability field (aka TaxRegionCode) to ‘turn off Avalara’ for any customer that is not in USA.
