Resales Certificate Tracking

At a prior company, we used Avalara AvaTax integrated with Acumatica, and their Exemption Certificate Management (ECM) handled all our resale and exemption certificates for customers. It was a game-changer while we had it.

Basically, on the Customers screen in Acumatica, we’d set the customer's tax zone and exemption type (like Resale), and Avalara would validate if there was a valid certificate on file. The certificates themselves were uploaded and managed in Avalara ECM, it tracked expirations, sent automated reminders to customers, and even let us request new ones directly from Acumatica in the later versions.

During tax calculation on orders/invoices, AvaTax checked the certificate status automatically and only applied exemptions if everything was valid. It was also helpful for audits since everything was centralized and documented well enough that we could find the information easily...

Before we had Avalara, we just attached the PDF certificates to the customer record in Acumatica and used custom fields for the certificate number and expiration date. We’d use a GI to flag upcoming expirations. It worked okay for smaller volumes, but we quickly outgrew that approach, and honestly, I wouldn’t recommend trying to manage it natively in Acumatica long-term, as it misses a ton of key functionality that Avalara provides. We did have our issues with them too, but all in all it was a positive experience.  I’d still recommend looking into the Avalara integration if you have a lot of exempt customers, the automation alone was definitely worth it.

Thank you so much for this information.