Avalara Integration

Through our Avalara integration, you can automatically calculate sales tax rates for your transactions. Overall, Avalara takes into account, among others, the following parameters:

• The type(s) of products that you are selling
• The ship-from-location of the products
• The ship-to-location (customer)
• The customer type (e.g., government, private entity)
• The resale certificate of the customer

In addition, Avalara’s powerful address validation feature ensures you never ship an item to the wrong location. Remember that you should contact our support team to enable the Avalara integration for your platform. Let’s see how you can set up the Avalara integration.

Setting up the Avalara Integration

To connect Avalara to your B2B Wave account, follow these steps:

Step 1. Contact our support team to activate Avalara for your account.

Step 2. Sign up for Avalara. Remember that the team at Avalara can support you with setting up and categorizing your products and customers based on your industry.

Step 3. Go to Settings >Extra fields to create additional fields for your products and customers on B2B Wave. Specifically, you should add the following fields: 

Step 4. Login to your Avalara account and click on the “Settings” tab. Then, select “License and API keys” Click “Generate license key” under the “AvaTax License key” section.

Step 5. Copy your Avalara license key.

Step 6. Move to B2B Wave, go to Settings >Profile, and look for the “Integrations” tab. Next, copy your “Avalara Account id”  to the “Avalara Account Id OR Avalara Username*” field  and your license key to the “Avalara License Key OR Avalara Password*” field.

Step 7. Click “Test connection and select company” to check if these credentials are valid. Also, remember to select if you’re using Avalara’s Sandbox (test) or Production environment from the drop-down menu in the “Service URL*” field. If the connection is successful, the company you’ve set up in Avalara will show up. 

NOTE: Currently, B2B Wave only supports sales order transactions for tax calculations. As such, you should use your accounting/ERP solution for invoicing.

Defining Additional Settings for the Avalara Integration

You can fill in additional settings for items, customers, and shipping through Settings >Profile >Integrations. These additional settings indicate the fields B2B Wave uses when sending data to Avalara and their default values when these fields are empty. Specifically:

1. Items Settings. Select “TaxCode (Avalara)” (the extra field you’ve created before) from the “Item Tax Code field*” drop-down menu. On the “Default Tax Code*” field, enter the default tax code to be used if you haven’t set a tax code for this item.
2. Customers. Select “Entity Use Code (Avalara),” “Customer Code (Avalara),” and “Exemption Certificate Number” from the drop-down menu in the relevant field, as shown below. Please note that for the “Avalara Customer Code” field, you can also select the customer’s Reference Code. This is useful if this value is common among B2B Wave, Avalara, and your accounting/ERP solution.
3. Shipping. Set the appropriate values under the “Shipping Tax Code” (same for all transactions) and “Shipping SKU*” fields.  

NOTE: You may need to update the values for the extra fields you’ve created for the Avalara integration. To see how you can do this, read our Extra fields article. 

Understanding How the Avalara Integration Works

Once you’ve set up the integration, customers can see sales taxes applied to their orders on your storefront. At the same time, you can see sale taxes calculations for each order and validate customers’ shipping addresses. Specifically:

1. Storefront

Customers can see each order’s taxes when navigating the order review page by clicking the magnifying glass icon. This way, they can see a detailed analysis of the taxes applied based on their parameters.

NOTE: Sales taxes will be re-calculated on the order confirmation page.

2. Orders (Admin panel)

You can see how sales taxes are calculated for a specific order. To do so, select the order you want to review through the Orders menu, then scroll down to the “Products” section on the page that opens.

3. Validating Customer Addresses (Admin panel)

You can validate customer addresses using the Avalara integration. To do so, go to the Customers menu and click on the customer you want to do this for. On the “Editing customer” page, go to the “Customer details” tab, and click “Validate address with Avalara.” This feature is useful when you get new customer applications and want to validate their shipping address and ensure that their sales taxes are calculated as accurately as possible.

If an address is valid, Avalara may suggest a few changes (e.g., detailed postal code or different spelling for the address). You can choose to keep the existing address or switch to Avalara’s suggestion, as shown below.

NOTE: If you have questions or need help setting up this integration, reach out to our support team.