Sage 100

Is DSD AvaTax the same as Avalara? I have a CPA firm asking me for help with one of their clients that has Sage 100 v2013. Can someone give me a brief explanation of how Sage 100 passes information to the sales tax program for calculation? Also, how does reporting work? Are sales tax reports on a web portal? Are the standard Sage 100 sales tax reports still relevant? Are there additional sales tax reports added to the Sage 100 menu when AvaTax is installed?

DSD wrote the interface for Avalara. When an order is entered with a tax schedule of AVATAX, it goes online and checks what taxes the ship-to address is subject to and adds it to the sales tax field on the totals tab. Other than address validation and tax recalc icons, nothing is added to Sage (besides the setup on LM\Setup). The AR Sales Tax report will show City, County, Special, State, etc. but the real detail is on the Avalara dashboard where it breaks it down by each jurisdiction. A very high level overview...

DSD, not sure. AvaTax is Avalara. At order entry and Invoice Update, Avalara checks their server for tax calculation based on the Sales Tax Schedule (Usually ""AVATAX"") and the Ship To Address. The Standard Sage 100 Sales Tax Report is not useful, because all states use the same sales tax schedule. No additional sales tax reports are available on the Sage 100 menu. The Web Portal will have all the tax reports you need. Different service levels are available. The client can pay to have their sales tax payments auto paid to the tax authority.

Great information. Thank you @ThereseLogeais and @MadelineStefanou

In most cases, the end user has access to some type of Avalara portal. I think there is a spot where they can download the latest integration. Be advised that Avalara recently noted they will only support the same levels that Sage supports so the 2013 version is not under support for Avalara which primarily means if the end user needs to call they may get prompted to go through an upgrade rather than receive an updated Avalara integration.

I am pressing everyone on 2014 and below to upgrade.

I tell everyone - if you're not on a version eligible for product updates then consider the product to only be receiving basic support and for full patch support stay on the versions that are receiving product updates. I think Sage have given people a song and dance about creating one-off patches for versions not receiving the product updates. And every signal that I see from Sage is that this will likely continue due to capacity constraints.

We used Avatax internally with Sage 100 before moving to Acumatica. Reporting is done from an Avalara portal, very easy to navigate. We also evaluated Vertex as a comparison -- as a user I felt Vertex had more features included with the cost. One thing we learned about Vertex is that it doesn't work with 100 Premium. Feel free to email me with any questions

@MelissaSecody Avalara doesn't work with Acumatica? Thoughts on Vertex?? TIA!!

@ThereseLogeais Currently Avalara is the only tax option for Acumatica; we are using them again with our Acumatica in-house system. When we evaluated Vertex for Sage 100 -- my opinion was that on the pricing side they had more advantages as they include more with their base price: tax returns, exemption cert tracking, use tax. Payment is in arrears so you pay only for what you really use and they don't charge for sales orders, only actual invoices. I can't speak for the support or integration since we didn't get that far.