Avalara is a sales tax software that automates tax calculations and the tax filing process. Avalara provides real-time tax rates from more than 12,000 taxing jurisdictions. To use Avalara's Avalara-certified integration you must be using either BigCommerce or Shopify Plus.

This guide provides an overview of Avalara, installation steps, and support resources.

Supported features

• Get accurate and up-to-date tax codes from more than 12,000 jurisdictions
• Fine-tune your tax rules 
• Create accurate tax reports
• Shopify merchants can also use tax overrides for each product sold in Shopify

Enable Avalara

To enable Avalara: 

1. Create or connect your existing Avalara account in your ecommerce platform tax settings.
2. Set up your Avalara tax codes for each product or variant in your ecommerce platform.
   • If you are on the Recharge Checkout on Shopify, sync your subscription rules. This syncs the product/variant tax codes that you've configured in Shopify with a new duplicate product in Shopify. These new duplicate products, used for subscription checkouts, are then updated with the correct tax details.
3. Reach out to Avalara support and request to activate the Recharge Connector. 
4. Contact the Recharge support team to enable the Avalara integration on your store. Provide the team with your:
   • Avalara Account ID and License Key, or Avalara username and password.
   • Company Code.
   • Full address for the account:
     • Country
     • Address
     • City
     • Province/State
     • Postal Code
5. When Avalara is enabled on Recharge, Recharge automatically refreshes the queued charges on your store. This allows the system to fetch the new Avalara-informed tax rates on all orders.

How Avalara works

Avalara Avatax is embedded in Shopify Plus and can be enabled by any Shopify Plus merchant and all BigCommerce merchants. Enabling this integration involves creating tax codes in Avalara and then associating them with product variants in your ecommerce platform. When used with Recharge's Avatax integration, both one-time purchases and subscription purchases will reference these tax codes in your ecommerce platform via the variant API.

First charge at checkout/UI/API

Recharge references the Avalara tax code from your ecommerce platform (which is informed by Avalara Avatax) for a specific purchase. It then applies the correlated rate based on this specific Avalara tax code.

Recurring charges

Recharge references the Avalara tax code from the queued charge JSON for a given subscription. These tax codes are updated if the charge is regenerated, and a new charge is generated again each time. Keep in mind, you must regenerate existing queued charges if you want them to reference any tax codes that were updated after they were generated.

Reporting

Merchants who use the Recharge/Avalara integration can leverage their tax reporting features with full confidence that subscription purchase information will be accurate. This is because Recharge creates orders in your ecommerce platform with tax information and your ecommerce platform creates invoices in Avalara based on these orders.

Connecting stores to one Avalara account

It is possible to connect multiple stores to one Avalara account. You need to create two companies within the Avalara dashboard and have each store connected with each store, so it will be one account ID but two different companies within the dashboard. 

Product exemptions

Tax exemptions set at the product level by default do not currently work as expected. To set up a tax-exempt product you can use the custom tax code ON030000 as mentioned in the article Set up an Account or a Product as Tax Exempt with AvaTax. 

Avatax can be used to apply VAT to Recharge. VAT address needs to be set up in the sales tax setting and ensure the Shopify or BigCommerce and Recharge integrations are enabled. When enabled, we calculate according to the VAT rate for that region.

Support for Avalara

If you have any questions or require more information about the feature set, reach out to the Avalara support team.

Avalara is supported by Recharge for Shopify merchants. If you require troubleshooting assistance, reach out to Recharge support.

The app is considered in Early Adopter status for BigCommerce and provided as-is.