¶ Avalara
Freedom supports Avalara's AvaTax system for calculating taxes. On every event where a tax calculation is required, such as checking out in the shopping cart or when adding items in the Fredom Back Office, an API call is made to Avalara to determine what tax rate to use.
¶ Prerequisites
- In order to use Avalara's AvaTax system, the settings
SOA_TAXENGINE_IN_USEandBO_ORDERS_SOA_SAVEORDERLOGICmust be enabled! These are ByDesign-Only settings, meaning you will need assistance enabling it. If you partnered with ByDesign after June, 2021, these should already be enabled and you should have no issues. - You will also need an Avalara account, and it is recommended you have a sandbox configured with Avalara to connect to for testing purposes.
- ALL PRODUCTS AND SERVICES BEING SOLD MUST BE CONFIGURED INSIDE AVALARA.
¶ Configuration
The followingare the configuration steps:
- Tax Codes
- Tax Methods
- Integration Provider Account
- Inventory item update
¶ Tax Codes
Avalara's Tax Codes will determine the amount of tax to charge for each item. Avalara's tax codes can be found using their Tax Codes Search Tool, however please contact Avalara to determine which tax codes will be needed for the items and serices.
To create the new tax codes in Freedom, navigate to the Tax Categories and select + to create a new category fror the code.
Freedom BackOffice > Department > Administration > Settings > Taxes > Tax Categories
On the Create page, fill in the Tax Code field and provide the description that will be displayed for the tax code in the Inventory Category drop downs and other tax related areas, such as the Tax Methods. Once completed, click Create.
¶ Tax Methods
Tax Methods will tie the newly created tax categories and the countries they will be applied to.
Creating Tax Methods is a ByDesign-Only feature. Once the new tax categories have been created, contact ByDesign to create the tax methods, providing the new tax categories and the countries they will need to be associated to.
Freedom BackOffice > Department > Administration > Settings > Taxes > Tax Methods
¶ Avalara Integration Provider Account
The Integration Provider Account will tie Freedom to your account with Avalara. To configure the account, you will need your credentials for your Avalara account.
Verify that you are able to log into Avalara with the account username & password. If you cannot, then when you Base64 encode the credentials, Freedom will not be able to communicate with Avalara.
Navigate to the Integration Provider Accounts and select New to create the account for Avalara.
Departments -> Administration -> Settings -> Integrations -> Integration Provider Accounts -> New
From the Integration Provider drop down, select Avalara and fill in the following required fields:
- Description: identifying description for the new Integration Provider Account
- Active: ensure this is enabled
- Account Username: Avalara Username
- Account Password: Avalara Password
- Test Connection URL: https://sandbox-rest.avatax.com/api/v2/utilities/ping
- Live Environment URL: https://rest.avatax.com/api/v2
Make sure that the URL is https://rest.avatax.com/api/v2 and not https://rest.avatax.com/api/v2/
- API_KEY: This is the Base64 combination of the Avalara Username and Password.
- Company Code: The company code in Avalara can be found under Settings > Company Details, as shown in the image below.
Although the username and password are not used by Freedom to access Avalara, you will need these credentials to generate the Base64 API Key. It is best practice to fill in the fields to ensure that if anything changes and the encoded API Key stops working, you can view the original configuration to verify if there has been a change in credentials.
¶ Generate API key
The API Key required for the Integration Provider Account is the Base64 combination of the Avalara Username and Password. You will have to use Base64 encoding to generate the API key.
Using a Base64 encoder site, enter the Avalara username and password in the format ClientsUsername:ClientPassword, and encode.
For example: For the formatted username and password johnsmigh@nomail.com:P@$$W0RD, the Base64 encoded value returned is am9obnNtaWdoQG5vbWFpbC5jb206UEAkJFcwUkQ=. This is the Base64 key that will be used for the API Key.
For additional information on generating the API Keys, please refer to Avalara's FAQ article for info on generating API Keys.
¶ Updating Inventory Items
Finally, once the Tax Categories, Tax Methods, and Integration Provider Account have been configured, ensure that all Inventory items have been updated to use the correct tax codes/categories.
Departments > Inventory > Select item > Edit
¶ Reviewing Orders
Once Avalara has been configured, ensure to validate that orders are being taxed reflected correctly in Avalara. Orders are recorded in Avalara once they are official orders.
Orders can be researched by viewing the Doc Code from Avalara transactions which is the Order or
Online order in Freedom.
