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[Debbie Parod]

If anyone in the group has implemented Avatax as a third party to provide tax calculations would you be kind enough to give a brief synopsis of your implementation?  What was the time line it took, how effective and accurate was the initial implementation?  What issues did you encounter after the connector was live?  Are you satisfied with the functionality?  We are using AX 2012.

Any insights available would be appreciated.

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Debbie Parod
Montana Silversmiths
Columbus MT
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[Sheryl Adelson Schiffman]

Hello Debbie,

There’s so many choices within the Dynamics Communities of partners and it can be quite confusing.  However, within the Sales and Use Tax space there are actually very few who have the ability to deliver accurate tax results to remain compliant.

Wolters Kluwer, or more commonly known as CCH in the world of tax, does automate and deliver Sales and USE Tax to companies throughout the Dynamics AX communities and has done so successfully for many years.  The key focus is to eliminate RISK within your environment.

WK CCH has a team of experts who research, deliver with knowledge of both AX and Tax, and support your tax needs.  This is not intended to sound like a pitch as much as it is to inform who the choices are within the AX world.

Best of luck with your tax needs and happy to assist you should you need it.

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Sheryl Adelson Schiffman
888-545-0339
Wolters Kluwer
Dallas TX
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[Karen Morrell]

Hi – We are using AX2012 and are integrated with Avalara as is our webstore.  Avalara has a very good support system via screen share to go through step by step setting up the integration to AX.  We have sales in all states and Avalara also handles our sales and use tax filing.  I think the AX integration was a scheduled 2 hour meeting as they have integration team members (as well as support staff) who know AX.  We were using Avalara prior to integration with AX so I could not give you the timeline from start of quotation to your account setup with them.  As an added bonus there are “rules” or settings on the Avalara site to handle some special tax issues instead of using AX code change that we have .

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Karen Morrell
Controller
Forney Industries, Inc.
Fort Collins CO
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[Phil Earle]

Hi – I have implemented Avatax and Wolters Kluwer. I have also set up US sales tax in AX without add ons and have experience setting up AX for Canadian GST/HST/QST and setting up VAT in most European countries.

If anyone has any questions on these options please send a message my way and I will try to answer.

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Phil Earle
TASER International
Scottsdale AZ
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[Zvika Rimalt]

I wonder if any of the people here who implemented Avalara or the CCH product (as opposed to the people here trying to SELL these products) ran into the same issues that I have seen in the past

1. In many cases companies set up in AX multiple sales tax groups, one for each state or geographical location.
At the time these products seemed to only be able to post into a single sales tax group – which made it difficult to separate the sales tax liability into separate ledger accounts, per state.

2.Did you have a scenario where for a single transaction (or sales order) you needed to post into more than one sales tax code (for example – California sales tax, and the added Los Angeles region sales tax) 

3. Were you using the product for sales outside the USA?
These products did not seem to have good support for VAT/Canadian GST or purchase side calculation/integration

It’s been a couple of years so maybe these flaws were already corrected, so it would be good to hear recent experiences.

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Zvika Rimalt
Functional Solution Architect
Vancouver BC Canada
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[Archive User]

[Steve Padfield]

Hi Debbie,
We have implemented Avatax. We are on AX 2012 R2. We went live April 1, 2016 and started our talks with Avalara in November of 2015. The implementation could have been faster, but we wanted a go-live date that made sense. January 1 would have been best but that would have been a tall order. So we pushed it out to the second quarter. We only have Nexus in one state (California). We had a few hiccups in the first install and configuration in our DEV, but between our partner and Avalara, it got worked out. After we went live the issues we had were related to sales orders/invoices that were done before the switch. For example, if we had to credit and re-bill an order/invoice, we would have to make sure to change the tax fields to what they were before the switch so they were not reported as new transactions to Avalara. The accuracy seems to be good as far as calculating the tax rate. We had a change January 1 in sales tax in California, and it was correct, right off the bat.

We are also using Avalara CertCapture to manage our customers’ tax exempt certificates. However, we are not using the integration from that, we are manually changing our customers’ tax status in AX.

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Steve Padfield
IT Manager
P.W. Gillibrand Co., Inc.
Simi Valley CA
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[Matthew Brown]

I implemented Avalara’s solution once at a prior company.  The go-live went well, but we found tax discrepancies after go-live where the state tax liabilities on the tax returns were higher than the taxes charged on invoices.  There was insufficient Avalara technical support so we ended up troubleshooting and fixing the coding problems ourselves.  The ultimate outcome was we determined that Avalara assumed sales orders would only be hand entered.  When orders came through AIF there were software gaps where the tax was calculated in the Avalara cloud and added to the tax returns, but the same tax amount was no returned to the sales order so certain customers were never charged the tax that was added to the returns.  I am now using Wolters/CCH Sales Tax Office and very happy with their solution.  There are no variances of any sort.

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Matthew Brown
Direct, ERP Global Financial Systems
CPP, Inc
Sunnyvale CA
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