#matchison-avalara-tax
atomic spear
These are for one-off invoices. Management doesn't want to use subscriptions..
novel frost
all good, and you don't want to use Stripe Tax either?
atomic spear
We are exploring Stripe Tax as an option. We had a call with some folks at Stripe yesterday and they suggested quotes as an option. But it isn't off the table. We just want to see if we can achieve what we want to do with quotes first.
novel frost
okay so with that out of the way: when you accept the Quote it creates an invoice that isn't finalized so Avalara can add the tax rate to it, or you can. So what isn't working?
atomic spear
It works, but we want to show the tax on the quote as well. If I add it, it messes with the calculations on the invoice. If I just send the quote without the tax, everything works correctly. But management wants that tax included on the quote.
novel frost
Can you give me an example?
atomic spear
Sure. Here is a screenshot of a test invoice that was generated with a default tax rate of 10%. It first calculates the tax, using the base rate of $99, then calculates the tax using the tax rate I set on the quote, which balloons the amount beyond what should be the actual charged amount.
$105.56 would be the correct amount that should be charged to the customer.
novel frost
I'm not sure I follow
What does that have to do with quotes?
To me it looks like you are adding tax twice differently
one as a global rate for the whole invoice and once as a line item for some reason
atomic spear
Sorry. So this is the invoice from the acceptance of the quote.
This is the quote itself. Ignore that the tax amount is different because I am just running tests at this point. We use AvaTax to calculate the rate based on the address, so the tax rate on the quote is not accurate. I used a predefined tax rate we had set in the dashboard just to see what would happen.
atomic spear
Yes. The invoice id is in_1L45N7CzVAlNjr2PJcRwmH3p
novel frost
This is Avalara's own platform manually adding an invoice line item for the tax
so really, this is not going to work.
Like if you manually set the tax yourself on the Quote, that means you have already calculated it in some way right?
Why do you set a 10% global tax if Avalara things the tax should be a lot lower?
I also assume Avalara has never integrated with our Quote product (which is newer) and that's part of the issue too
atomic spear
This is just for testing. This would not be what we would do ideally. I am just trying to learn how to apply the tax to the quote at this point.
What I "might" do is call the Avalara API to obtain the tax and then add it to the quote. We were hoping there was a way to utilize the connection between Stripe and Avalara (as it works in invoicing), but based on this testing, it looks like we would end up "double taxing" the customer. So, it almost sounds like we cannot obtain the result we want by using quotes; unless we can convince management to only submit the quote with the base amount. Sadly, I don't think they will go for that.
I haven't exhausted all options at this point. I will play around with using price data and see what happens there. Do you have to have a tax rate set in the dashboard or will it accept a value? I found that you had to use an array with the default_tax_rates, and it appears that might be the case here as well.
novel frost
Just to take a step back: Avalara has a Connect app that listens to invoice creation on your account and then calculates the tax for you adn automatically adds line items to reflect this
So if you keep adding the tax to the quote yourself you're going to break Avalara's tax calculation
atomic spear
OK, that was what I thought might happen, but was hoping there was a way to add the tax to it.
novel frost
So there are 2 paths forward here that I can think of
1/ Work with Avalara to see if they have plans to add tax calculation to the Quote API instead of invoices. That way they calculate tax at the Quote time, set it on the Quote and you're done
2/ Use Avalara's API to calculate the tax upfront, set it on the tax yourself and prevent Avalara from modifying your invoices
atomic spear
OK. Number 2 is not really an option. We depend on them to send out our transactions, and we are trying to minimize the amount of our interference with the native flow. So, I will talk to management about what we have discussed and see what they want to do to move forward.
Thank you so much for your help with this @novel frost!