Understand the AvaTax Integration

The AvaTax integration connects Maxio to your Avalara AvaTax account to calculate, validate, and remit Sales Tax on Invoices. Maxio syncs Items and Entity Use Codes with Avalara, calculates Sales Tax based on validated Customer and Invoice addresses, and lets you commit that tax to Avalara for official recording and remittance.

Key capabilities

The AvaTax integration gives you:

• Automatic Sales Tax calculation based on Item tax codes, Customer exemptions, and validated addresses.
• Address validation for Customers, Contracts, and Invoices, individually or in bulk.
• Entity Use Codes for tax-exempt Customers and Contracts.
• Reconciliation to catch mismatches between Maxio's and Avalara's committed Sales Tax.

What syncs

Two kinds of data move between Maxio and Avalara:

• Items: Maxio sends Items to Avalara, assigning the default Avalara Sales Tax Code to any Item that doesn't already have one. Maxio also links Items that already exist independently in both systems by matching name, without creating new Items in Maxio.
• Entity Use Codes: Avalara's global list of Entity Use Codes syncs into Maxio. Custom Entity Use Codes you create in Maxio aren't synced back to Avalara as a code definition. Only the code value is sent with each transaction, so its exemption logic must already be configured in Avalara's own admin console.

Prerequisites

(Required) An active Avalara AvaTax account. Contact Maxio Support to enable AvaTax for your account if you don't already have access.

Customer responsibilities

Keep the following accurate and up to date so AvaTax can calculate tax correctly:

• Tax codes, nexus jurisdictions, and Entity Use Code logic within Avalara's own admin console. Maxio doesn't manage this tax logic itself.
• A valid Merchant Address in your AvaTax integration settings. Without one, Sales Tax can't be estimated or committed, even with automatic commit enabled.
• Customer and Invoice addresses, to avoid tax calculation errors.

Limitations

Invoices with an unresolved AvaTax error status won't sync to your general ledger integration or be added to your Invoices-to-email list until the issue is resolved.

Related information

To connect the integration, see Setup the AvaTax Integration.

To configure your tax settings, see Configure the AvaTax Integration.

To sync Items and Entity Use Codes, see Sync Items and Entity Use Codes with AvaTax.

To estimate or commit Sales Tax day-to-day, see Estimate Sales Tax on Invoices and Commit Sales Tax to AvaTax.

If you use the Advanced Billing only workflow instead of Maxio Core, see Understand Tax Options.