This presumes that you have installed the BirdDog Enterprise for Windows software.
Supported O/E Order Types
The BirdDog and AvaTax integration supports regular sales orders (O type), invoices (I type), debit memos (D type), and credit memos (C type) from O/E.
Processing Orders and Tax Calculation
When you generate a sales order, invoice, debit memo, or credit memo, the sales order or invoice information is automatically sent to AvaTax when you Process Invoices in Enterprise for Windows.
Note: There is a charge from Avalara for each tax transaction. The AvaTax integration is designed to use the minimum number of tax transactions. Changing a sales order, invoice, debit memo, or credit memo after selecting it for billing and printing the invoice creates additional tax transactions.
AvaTax has a 1,000 line item limit on sales orders and invoices. If you enter a sales order or invoice with 1,000 line items or more, AvaTax displays an error. Sales orders or invoices that have more than 1,000 line items should be entered as multiple orders.
Credit Memos and Tax Calculation
Credit Memos are calculated differently. They use the transaction date of the invoice they apply to so that we can calculate the correct sales tax amount since rates may have changed.
Non-Taxable Customers
If you have non-taxable customers, there are a couple of ways you can handle this:
- Uncheck the Taxable property on the customer. BirdDog will tell AvaTax it is a non-taxable transaction.
- Check the Taxable property and assign a Tax Service Entity Use Code to the customer and / or ship to address. This allows you to handle more nuanced sales tax transactions such as government and charity organizations.
Non-Taxable Items
If you have items that are non-taxable, there are two ways to handle them:
- Uncheck the Taxable property on the Item. BirdDog will send the NT Tax Service Code to AvaTax.
- Check the Taxable property on the Item and assign a Tax Service Code. This allows you to handle more nuanced sales tax transactions such as food or apparel.
Estimating, Posting, and Committing of Transactions
Currently, when we display sales tax during checkout of Ecommerce, enter a sales order in customer service, or print an order acknowledgment in Enterprise for Windows, we get an estimate of sales tax from Avalara. Estimate transactions only cost 1/10 of a transaction for billing purposes with Avalara. When you process an invoice in our software (Billing in Enterprise or Invoicing in Enterprise for Windows) we post the transaction to Avalara, but do not commit it (it will show up in the AvaTax, but is not permanent yet). Since it is only posted (not committed), you can still reprint and say it didn't print OK, edit it, and then process again which will cause it to be updated at Avalara. Once the invoice is posted in the ERP system, we will then commit the transaction at Avalara, which makes it permanent and can only be changed with a credit memo.
Production versus Testing
We access two different URLs depending on if the sales tax account is set to testing:
Macola Special Note
Do not confuse how this connector works with how Macola's connector works. Macola only processes tax on orders that have a special tax code (in this case, normally AVA). In our software, the tax code or tax schedule is irrelevant as we process all orders regardless of tax code/schedule.