Core Financial Modules

[kdf]

A MAS90 client using AvaTax for 2 full years now received a bill for an extra $15k over standard 'invoice volume' rates.  As it turns out, the charges were for some 24,000 AV's or Address Verifications done by MAS90 in all of 2010.  This particular MAS user does not have that many customers nor does it have high volumes of invoicing.  Avalara has made some concessions on the AV charges but going forward, we are trying to limit the amount of times MAS90 does an AV.

Does anyone know how or what MAS90 counts as an address verification??  The analyst from Avalara mentioned that Great Plains, before a change was made, used to do an AV everytime you moved from Address 1, Address 2, City, State, etc. on the Customer Maintenance screen.  I wonder if MAS is doing something similiar. 

Any insight would be appreciated, thanks in advance.

Keith  

[TomTarget]

Address verifications?    Seriously?

I thought it only counted a transaction when an invoice was committed.   Time to reread the terms I guess.

[kdf]

Yeah, our sentiments exactly.    The AvaTax salespeople present it that it is based on invoicing but there are other factors.  There is something wrong with the 'other factors' piece that is causing exorbinant charges for these AV's and we are not sure where its being done.     

[TomTarget]

I suggest talking to your rep at Sage about this one and see if they can help figure this out.

Assuming that your client really doesn't have anywhere near that number of transactions,  I wonder if it's possible that an a program update may have a bug in it that is inadvertently tripping the count.

And if there is a misrepresentation as to what counts as a transaction,  I'm sure Sage would want to get this resolved or there are going to be a large number of  unhappy clients shortly.

I'm going to check with some of my clients and see if they are noticing an abnormal number of hits.  No one has complained so far.

[TomTarget]

Checked with one of my clients to see if they are seeing unusually high transaction counts,  however,  I can't seem to find anything on their website that tracks the count other than the history reports of committed transactions and the numbers look reasonable.

So if they are charging for address verifications on top of the committed transactions,  I can't find any place that reports it.

[kanes]

We've used AvaTax for 2-1/2 years. This verification issue has never arisen. I've contacted our rep.

Steve

MAS200 V4.30.21

[russnobbs]

We also started to go over our allotted usages with Avatax at the end of last year.  At first we thought it was because after upgrading to 4.4 we saw the Avalara connecter pop up even when looking at an invoice in history and a number of other times when no calculation or address validation was called for. It seems those connector calls are not counted by Avalara. 

 It was a little difficult to get exact details about what IS counted.  After asking in several ways we finally learned the following:

What is meant by "billable documents?"
Is it invoices that are charged sales tax using AvaTax to make the calculation and store the results.?  All sales order, accounts receivable invoices and credit memos that have the AVATAX schedule assigned to them.

What is meant by "Billable Line Items?"  Multiples of 35 line items on an invoice/credit each count as 1 transaction.

What is meant by "Billable get tax?"  This is specific to e-commerce website integrations

What is meant by "Billable AddVal?"  Addresses that are processed through the batch address validation utility or directly off of the customer maintenance window

Is it Address Validation?  What makes one address validation (or verification) billable and another address validation not billable?  Address that are sent to our service separate from an invoice/credit memo/sales order.

In an on line chat we asked what defines a "transaction?" Here is that conversation:

I'm trying to find out why our transactions are exceeding our allotted amount. We are allotted 3300 for the year, but we are getting reports from you guys saying the transactions are hitting 5600. What exactly constitutes a transaction? 
* Document Count, meaning the greater of the following: (i) the count of unique documents that you commit or void within the Service; or (ii) the count of line items contained in those documents divided by 35; or (iii) the count of tax calculation requests submitted by any SDK connectors attached to your account divided by 10; plus
* Non-Tax Address Validation Count divided by 10, meaning the count of address validation requests you submit to the Service, excluding address validations performed in the process of calculating tax.

Our business is down slightly in 2011 vs 2010. We did not go over our allotment last year so we are still not quite sure why the difference. We did learn that the overage charge per "transaction"  has gone up in 2012.The difference may be in how transactions were defined in prior years.