Method Community

Hello Method Team,
I am looking to develop a Tax Calculation Integration for your platform. At DSTax we build integrations that connect various CRMs, ERPs, and other e-commerce solutions to the Onesource Tax API. We want to be able to synchronously send data from a transaction through our tax calculation API and apply the resulting tax to that transaction(sales order, invoice, estimate, etc).

I've been looking at how to develop our integration for your platform and have a few questions.

1. Based on one of the forum posts I've learned that Avalara does not directly integrate with Method CRM but rather Avalara and Method both sync their data with Quickbooks. Would this approach be the current best option for "integrating" with your platform?

2. If we can integrate directly with Method CRM I would still like some clarification on the preferred way to do this as the problems I'm running into include:

1. Synchronous tax calculations for orders, invoices, etc. How can we set up our logic to be triggered automatically during the order process?
2. Is sales tax dependent on Quickbooks?

Hi DSTaxKy,

Thanks for reaching out to Method Community!

For the first part of your question, yes this is correct. We do not have any direct integration with Avalara Tax. It syncs with QB then QB syncs with us. Similarly, We update the QB, and then the QB syncs with Avatax.

It is not the only approach as we do have an open API that you can use to build any integration with Method. You can read more about it here.

Also, for the second part, it really depends on the version of QB you are using whether it is QB Desktop or QB online. For QB Desktop, we sync back and forth all the data but when it comes to QB online we are dependent on QB to send us the Sales Tax information. In Method, we send the transaction to QB and after the sync, QB updates the tax and sends it back to Method.

Hope this helps!

Regards,

Inder

Hi Inder, 

In my time looking through the API documentation I can't seem to figure out how we would integrate with Method. The biggest hurdle being how would I configure Method to use our integration instead of Quickbooks for sales tax calculation? Or how can I trigger Method to call our integration during the order process. Ultimately, I'm trying to find out if it is possible to replace Method's default tax calculation without interacting with Quickbooks. 

No, we can't sync with outside sales tax systems through the API. Essentially even if you try when it syncs to QuickBooks, we would just use whatever QuickBooks calculates as the tax. Method isn't an accounting software, we are just set up to use whatever QuickBooks gives us and anything outside of that is not good accounting wise. 

Is there a reason you don't want to use the QB tax?

We used the Method customization team to integrate Avatax into Method fully. The key is that you DO NOT create invoices within QuickBooks and fully disable the Avatax integration with Quickbooks. From there, we have the Avatax API called each time you click save on the invoice page. It sends all data to Avalara, and they shoot back the tax. A new line is created for the tax on the invoice. If you delete the invoice from Method, it voids the transaction within Avalara. 

Long story short, it is entirely possible to do this integration. We have had very few issues with this. Occasionally we have the Avatax line get duplicated somehow, but we are still looking into this bug to figure out why it does it 1-2 times a month out of approx. 100 invoices. 

I recommend reaching out to the Method Customization team and letting them take care of the integration - they have experience doing this.