Sphere Integration Overview

Use the Sphere integration to calculate sales tax for invoices. Maxio sends customer, subscription, invoice, and catalog data to Sphere so Sphere can return real-time tax calculations and jurisdiction details.

The Sphere integration must be enabled for your site by Maxio Support or your CSM before the Sphere setup card appears in your tax settings.

Once it's connected and your tax calculation data is in place, confirm the result before you bill by working through Create a Taxed Subscription with Sphere or Create a Taxed Contract with Sphere.

Key capabilities

The Sphere integration supports real-time tax calculation, and tax metadata storage in Maxio. These capabilities help keep tax calculation and tax reporting aligned across both systems.

• Single source of credentials: Site settings hold your Sphere API key and let you test, update, or disable the connection from the Maxio UI.
• Preview tax quotes: Maxio calls Sphere for a soft quote when previewing taxes.
• Automated invoice metadata: Maxio converts successful Sphere calls into structured metadata, including jurisdiction breakdowns.
• Error transparency: Maxio surfaces Sphere API failures as user-friendly errors in the UI, logs them internally, and reports them to monitoring systems.
• Sandbox-safe testing: Sandbox credentials can be used to validate the connection and end-to-end behavior before going live.
• Tax-inclusive pricing: Sphere supports products and components priced with tax already included, and Maxio recalculates the taxable and tax amounts on those charges from Sphere's response.

What syncs

Maxio and Sphere exchange data over two channels: a tax API call for real-time calculations, and webhook events for transaction data import.

Prerequisites

Before using Sphere with Maxio, confirm that your Maxio site and Sphere account are ready. These requirements help prevent setup errors and failed tax calculations.

• The Sphere integration add-on is enabled for your site.
• A valid tax origin address is configured in Maxio.
• Your Sphere API key is available.
• Your Sphere account has the regions and product categories you sell in configured.
• Products and components are marked taxable when tax should apply.
• Sphere product tax codes are assigned when a product or component needs a specific tax category.
• Customer billing or shipping addresses are collected based on your site's tax address setting.

A site is considered fully configured for Sphere when a valid tax origin address is set in Maxio and valid Sphere API credentials have been saved.

Customer responsibilities

Even with the integration enabled, customers remain responsible for maintaining the tax settings that Sphere uses to calculate, report, and file taxes.

• Product taxability decisions.
• Product tax code assignment.
• Customer address collection and completeness.
• Tax origin configuration.
• Nexus configuration.
• Filing cadence and reporting setup, if used.

Maxio handles the data flow. Sphere handles the tax decisions.

Limitations

Review these limitations before enabling Sphere. They can affect provider selection, supported workflows, and how tax filing is managed outside Maxio.

• Only one tax provider can be active per site. Only one of Avalara, Anrok, Numeral, or Sphere can be active on a site at a time.
• Tax filing and reporting is managed in Sphere. Filing is configured and executed inside Sphere, not Maxio.
• Subscription groups are not supported in this release. Subscription group scenarios are out of scope for the initial release.
• Core to e-Bill is not supported. This release focuses on Maxio Invoicing Suite.