Plugin Description
WooCommerce AvaTax lets you streamline your tax rate calculations and tax management. This free plugin integrates with Avalara’s AvaTax services to automatically calculate the appropriate tax rates for your orders.
Add tax codes for your products and shipping rates, then Avalara will provide the correct tax assessment for every order — no need to guess at tax rates or add a bunch of tax rates for every location you sell to!
WooCommerce AvaTax lets you:
- Automatically calculate tax rates at checkout and for manually-created orders
- Automatically submit paid orders as AvaTax transactions
- Easily set a global product tax code, or override this code on a per category, per product, or per-variation basis as needed
- Automatically manage partial and complete refund tax adjustments when refunds are marked in WooCommerce
- Enable address validation for US and Canadian customers at checkout
- Set tax exemptions on a per-user basis
Configure Tax Codes
Set Tax Exemptions
Question
Rebecca –
Hi! We are using AvaTax global addon and have a nexus (and warehouse) in the US and a nexus (and warehouse) in UK. We have two questions:
1. When someone orders from the US we want to use product tax code FR030000
(tax is based on shipping and handling)
However, when someone orders from the UK, we want to use tax code FR (tax is based
on product)
In WooCommerce settings for Avatax there is only an option for one tax
code. How can we resolve this?
When someone from the UK goes to the checkout, the label for VAT says “taxes” instead of “VAT”. Is there a way to change that?
Quite urgent for us. Thanks!
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Beka Rice –
Hey Rebecca, I’m not 100% sure if this would resolve the issue for you, but we have Landed Cost support coming shortly to the plugin. This would let you add the harmonized tariff codes for products, along with classification code based on the country, which is used for taxability and any import duties. This sounds like it could be a solution, but I’m not 100% sure. Could you check with your Avalara rep if this is something that would solve the issue for you, or if you’d need something else?
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Question
Mickey Gauld –
I saw the new update for the Avalara avatax plugin on woocommerce and got excited, I hoped that it would have been fixed so that the process_checkout function would include the entered email address instead of Guest for the ‘customer’ field in the api request. I understand why it might use guest if the user is not logged in but this uses guest even when the user is logged in. That is the only thing that is keeping the plugin from working correctly for our system. I was very disappointed when I looked at the code and saw that it is still using guest.
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Beka Rice –
Hey Mickey, since that change affects more than just the tax exemption checks, it’s not something we want to include without full testing and checks from our contacts at Avalara. It’s still something we have in progress, but it needs to be fully tested and considered before releasing it 🙂 We’ll update your Zendesk thread as soon as we have confirmation on the proposed change to the way ID is used, which should be by early next week, and it’ll be in the changelog when added. thanks!
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Question
Mickey Gauld –
Will the plugin eventually allow the tax exempt status for customers to be set by state rather than by a global exemption?
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Mickey Gauld –
One other thing that would be nice would be the ability to either make the validate address mandatory or automatic.
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Beka Rice –
Right on, added this to the list to investigate as well 👍🏼 thanks Mickey!
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Mickey Gauld –
We have customers that may have tax exempt status for only some of the states that we have nexus in, however they may have us ship to multiple states. This means we need to be able to apply the tax exempt status to only the states that apply. Although I believe this could not be an issue if the plugin sent then actual customer code instead of guest right from the beginning. I looked in the logs and noticed that even for logged in users the first api request to get the taxes only uses guest. it is not until the customer pays and it sends the commited to avalara does it put the correct customer code. If the plugin included the correct customer code from the beginning then avalara would return the correct tax if the customer is set to tax exempt for that state in our avalara admin panel.
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Beka Rice –
Hey Mickey, thanks for the additional detail here. I have this on our list to double-check with the AvaTax team and investigate for our next fix — not sure if there was a reason for the initial guest API request or not, but at minimum we can make sure this is filterable. Thanks again!
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Beka Rice –
Hey Mickey, interesting question here! This isn’t something we’ve had a request for yet, I would love some additional detail. When you say “tax exempt per state”, do you mean this would apply to every customer with a shipping address in that state, or only certain customers when shipping to certain states?
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