AvaTax Event Service

The Avatax add-on is able to calculate taxes on SAP documents while being created in the SAP client, or by using the Avatax Document Generation Wizard. If you have third party tools, add-ons or solutions creating sales documents in SAP by using DI-API, DI-Server or Hana Service Layer, you won’t get taxes calculated on this documents by the Avatax add-on, because the add-on has no control over this process. The Avatax Event Service (AES) was designed to cover this scenarios. It is a windows service that is installed at the customer environment, and is able to get notified when new documents are created in the SAP Company, to apply the tax calculation process and/or post the created document to the Avalara portal. The AES requires a database table to be used as a Queue of events, each event representing a Sales Document in SAP being created or updated, and a script in the SAP company database stored procedure SBO_SP_TransactionNotification, to insert the event in the AES Queue. Using this method, the AES can be configured to monitor all the time for events in the SAP Company, and perform the calculation when applicable. Depending on the SAP document, the AES can:

  • Sales Orders
    • AES can calculate and set the calculated tax to the SAP document. After the document is processed, you will see the tax set to the document, as if you are calculating the tax in SAP with the add-on.
  • Invoices and A/R Credit Memo’s
    • AES can post and commit the document to Avalara.
    • Once an Invoice or Credit Memo is created in SAP, it cannot be modified. The tax cannot be set to the document, so keep in mind you will get the invoice or credit memo posted to Avalara, but you will NOT get the taxes set to the SAP invoice (as additional expense or line item).
    • Taxes will be set to the Avatax UDFs, as the UDFs are editable after a document is created in SAP.
    • AES can create a Journal Entry to register the tax in SAP (that will not be included in the invoice or credit memo). Check the configurations detail.

A common use of the AES is getting taxes calculated on sales orders created in SAP by eCommerces or when importing documents into SAP from other sales portals.