Had a meeting today on this with a customer and Avalara.
I still don't fully understand the role of the extractor and I could be wrong for some or all of the following -- this is how the Avalara rep explained the extractor ...
It appears that the extractor's main role is to pull in sales data from a marketplace like Amazon or Walmart.
There are two advantages to this:
1. There is no Avalara per-transaction cost for these transactions since the marketplace was doing the tax calc, collection and remitting. This gets the customer out of paying Avalara for a computation where the marketplace has already done one.
2. By pulling in additional transactions that occur outside of Sage ( and, no, I never quite got an answer to "how does this avoid doubling up on the invoice we already entered in Sage to ship the product to the user" your Avalara account has a fuller picture of everything entered ( which some states use for determining nexus ).
The way my customer is entering Walmart sales is they create a customer named "Walmart" and keep changing the name/address as the orders are fulfilled. They mark the sale as exempt by having a tax-exempt code in the main customer ( Walmart ). I've seen other companies manage the marketplace sales in a similar manner. Most don't want to set up a new customer for a one-off sale through a marketplace.
I didn't suggest to my customer that they use an extractor. I think Avalara did and the recommendation was primarily so that Avalara wouldn't charge my customer for all the tax calculations that weren't needed.
I will see what the customer has to say - if anything - about the impact of pulling in the additional transactions via extractor.
------------------------------
Wayne Schulz - Schulz Consulting - 860-516-8990
------------------------------