Sage 100

Has anyone else encountered this issue with Avalara / Avatax with "Orign" based jurisdictions and Misc. Items???

Business Need:

Miscellaneous items do not have a warehouse on the line; therefore no warehouse is being passed to Avalara for proper tax calculation.  Avalara defaults to the company main address when a warehouse is not identified. When a customer has nexus in an origin based state, tax on miscellaneous items only are not being calculated properly. 

When there is no warehouse on the line item (i.e a miscellaneous item), then the header warehouse should be passed to Avalara as the ship from address.

Enhancement Requested:

When a miscellaneous item is on the order, the header warehouse should be passed to Avalara as the ship from address.

Example:

Arizona is an origin based state.

Invoice is shipping from the Phoenix, AZ warehouse to a customer in Mesa, AZ.  Origin based tax should apply. 

 

For /MISCELLANEOUS, the ship from address is being calculated as the Addison, IL company main address, resulting in an incorrect tax calculation.

 

/MISCELLANEOUS @ $100 ship from Addison, IL results in 7.60 sales tax

Taxable item @ $100  ship from Phoenix, AZ results in 8.60 sales tax; thus sales tax is incorrect

If there is enough of us out there maybe we can lobby Avalara to have DSD update the logic.

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Bruce Kern
SWK Technologies Inc.
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A client of mine ran into this issue awhile back and after spending 4 months on it with Avalara, we threw in the towel and my client kept track of it manually for sales tax reporting.  Accommodating this would get my vote.

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[Michele] [Herzog] [CPA,CITP, CGMA]
[Overland Park] [KS]
[816-520-1365]
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Can a value be forced into the warehouse field by a script?
If it is Premium, then a trigger in SQL could put a value there.

You could test an order by DFDMing a value into the line warehouse field and see if Avalara uses it.  (and also check if it stays after making a change to the line.)

If that won't work, then I would take it to a public forum and point out that Avalara owes it's entire existence to how ridiculously convoluted the US tax system is, and if they want to market as handling it completely then it damn well better handle it completely.

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Phil McIntosh
President
Friendly Systems, Inc.
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You may be able to do a work around by assigning an Avalara tax code to one or more miscellaneous items.


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Doug Higgs
Midwest Commerce Solutions, Inc
(312) 315-0960
Chauffeur, Chef, and Personal Assistant to Sprinkles
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Avalara plays the long game. They can wear you down with meetings and referrals to other departments. And once you feel as if you're getting somewhere, you might be assigned a new customer account representative. I also never felt like Avalara understood the link between Sage and Avalara. The most frequent response I've gotten to technical inquiries is a link to the knowledgebase. And at least parts of the knowledgebase didn't seem to work with Sage - at least not the portion related to marketplace sales.

I still refer Avalara but educate the customer on what to expect. The customers who get really "burned" are those who "do their own research" and call after the fact to say they bought Avalara. In my experience, this solution works best for sophisticated accounting departments. Those small one person accounting departments where there is a bookkeeper-level person running the show may struggle.

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Wayne Schulz
wayne@s-consult.com
Schulz Consulting
(860) 516-8990
Moodus, CT
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This Misc Item Origin feature was added in February to versions 2022 and 2021.

Beware the "Validate Addresses in Data Entry" setting.  If enabled, it will automatically do what the Avalara icon does, i.e. validate and write back the USPS address.  This will also charge the Avalara subscription with an Address Validation charge.  The manual is not clear about this function.

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Bob Pfahnl
Manager - Silicon Valley
DSD Business Systems
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