Many business units face a heavy burden to generate audit reports, pay taxes and file returns on time. Avalara is a cloud-based software platform that provides scale-able business-centric services to automate all the tax calculations, file returns and to generate instant audit reports. Be any industry like IT Company, Retail, e-commerce, etc. Avalara makes hassle-free Tax calculations based on the Country/State Jurisdictions.
For proper calculation of Taxes across different countries which are governed by State and local tax authorities, one needs to have a valid address right from the start. By having Avalara integration with SugarCRM, this can be achieved when sales rep enter customer data into the system. Avalara exposes API to check if the provided address is a valid address or not.As of now, Avalara supports validation of addresses in the United State and Canada.
Why is Address Validation important?
Every mail or courier in the United States must be verified by the United State Postal Service (USPS) and USPS has defined standards to make sure that all addresses on the mail are valid. So it is very important for any company to have valid address data related to customers or any company related contact persons to receive the mail on time with less shipping charges.
Common Applications where Address Validation can be used:
- Shipping – Sales Teams in any organization while entering the data in the CRM requires the address to be saved. A verified address can avoid any unnecessary shipping issues for future deliveries.
- Invoicing – Before raising accounting entries, invoices should be validated. The validations process holds Order Calculation, Tax Calculation, Conversion Rates, or any company-specific validations. Correct Tax Calculation depends upon the Ship to Address and Bill to Address of the invoiced party, and it has to be verified and validated prior to generating the invoice.
- Documentation – Legal documents should always have the correct addresses, to avoid any future litigation.
- Transactions – Transactions are done via payment gateway mandates the validation of the address of the party to be charged, as a part of fraud detection. Pre-verified addresses ensure fail safe in this regard.
- Integration with 3rd party (federal organization) – When pushing some address related data to a federal org, it is also required that the address meets the USPS requirements. A verified address can ensure the transaction to be smooth.
The benefit of Avalara Address Proofing
Following are the benefits of using address validation and enrichment process.
- Auto-suggest – One of the best features one can offer to the salesperson can be to auto-suggest the correct address when he enters the wrong one eliminating the requirement of address validation on later stages of the sales cycle.
- Address formatting – Address Formatting is vital for any postal services and different countries have different formats defined.
- IRS acceptable US address – Address are auto formatted to the standards of IRS in US for accurate shipping services
AvaTax’s Address Validation API
Let’s take a use case where AvaTax’s address validation API would be a great help. For any eCommerce websites either in Business to Business or Business to Customer, the customer or user placing the order will have to provide a valid shipping address to apply correct tax rates. So once a user has entered the address then the address will be rapidly verified by Avalara by the following API.
Sample Address: 14 Lawton Road, Wappingers Falls NY
Request:
Response:
Response attributes:
| address | This attribute holds the requested data |
| validatedAddresses | This attribute displays the corrected address if any mistype in the requested address or else can be used as is |
| coordinates | Provides geo location of the address |
| resolutionQuality | Possible values – NotCoded, External, CountryCentroid, RegionCentroid, PartialCentroid, PostalCentroidGood, PostalCentroidBetter, PostalCentroidBest, Intersection, Interpolated, Rooftop, Constant
Intersection – Since the street address is not exactly matched, so matched the address with nearest intersection Not Coded – If the quality of the address provided is low |
| taxAuthorities | Provides necessary jurisdiction details |
API Errors
If any insufficient information is provided to the API
Response:
If a success response is received from Avalara but the address is not correct then a message attribute will be available in the response.
Advantages
- Avalara is a game-changer for any organisation as their tax payments and returns are calculated under multiple jurisdictions.
- AvaTax’s address validation makes accurate shipping and correct calculation of taxes.
- AvaTax’s address API provides suggestions for any wrong addresses provided.
- Integrating address validation API to any CRM, eCommerce websites would improve the overall shipments delivery and proper tax rate calculation.
Avalara’s Address validation is a must API to be used by the organization to store the valid addresses for their business contacts or customers. This helps the organisation to pay taxes accordingly to the country/state rights and will allow the packages to be delivered on time with the minimal shipping charges.
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