Avalara – integration overview and setup

Avalara ELR, short for Avalara E-Invoicing and Live Reporting, is a global e-invoicing solution that lets you automate tax calculation and e-invoicing, simplifying compliance processes for companies operating internationally. 

With the Avalara and Scoro integration, you can seamlessly submit your Scoro invoices to international tax authorities for e-invoicing compliance and pull inbound bills from Avalara directly into your Scoro site. 

This article provides an overview of how the Avalara integration works, how to connect both platforms, and how to configure the integration settings.

1. How the Avalara integration works

The Avalara integration functions as a bridge between your Scoro data and global e-invoicing networks. Here’s how it works:

• Data preparation: Scoro prepares your invoice data and applies the mandate and field mapping rules based on your integration settings. Mandates are country-specific e-invoicing requirements (e.g., Germany B2B via PEPPOL) that are defined and provided by Avalara.
• Mandate routing: Scoro identifies which mandate to apply based on three logic levels:
  • Priority override: If a specific mandate is pinned to an individual invoice, this takes priority over all other routing rules.
  • Bookmark Routing: For automatic and bulk manual syncs, Scoro uses invoice list bookmarks to automatically route invoices to the correct mandate mapping.
  • Manual Selection: When sending a single invoice via the quick action button in the invoice detail view or sending invoices in bulk from the invoice list, the user manually selects the mandate (bookmarks aren’t used).
• Submission: Scoro automatically or manually sends the prepared data to Avalara, depending on your sync settings.
• Validation & forwarding: Avalara validates the data and forwards it to the relevant network or tax authority (e.g., PEPPOL or a specific country’s tax body).
• Bill retrieval from Avalara: For inbound bills, Avalara gathers electronic files that Scoro then pulls and matches to your existing suppliers, products, and projects.

The integration supports a two-way synchronization:

• Sync invoices to Avalara (Outbound): Automatically or manually sync your Scoro invoices to Avalara based on your settings.
• Get bills and credit bills from Avalara (Inbound): Pull electronic documents from Avalara into Scoro to automate cost tracking and minimize manual data entry.

Here’s a quick overview of the integration requirements and setup process:

• Requirements: Before setting up the integration, you need to set up the required Avalara and Scoro settings as detailed in this section.
• Connecting both platforms: Once done, you must connect each of your Scoro entities to their corresponding Avalara Company profiles using secure credentials. This section will guide you through this process.
• Configuring the integration and related settings: Once both platforms are connected, the setup involves configuring the synchronization direction and settings, mapping Scoro's human-readable values to standardized codes, and defining mandates and their routing rules to ensure documents are sent through the correct channels. See this section for detailed instructions.

2. Plan availability

The Avalara integration is available as a free add-on for any Scoro plan. To use it, site administrators must first enable the Avalara integration add-on under Settings > Administration > Plan, add-ons and billing, and then set up the integration under Settings > Site settings > Integrations > Avalara.

Learn more about managing add-ons.

3. Requirements before setting up the integration

Before setting up the Avalara integration in Scoro, ensure you have completed the following in your Avalara account:

• Set up your Avalara companies (legal entities).
  • Avalara treats every legal entity as a separate company. If you have multiple entities on your Scoro site, you will need to connect each entity individually to its corresponding company profile in Avalara. For example, if you have 3 entities, you need to go through the integration process for each entity separately.
• Activate the mandates you will use.
  • A mandate is a country-specific e-invoicing requirement defined and provided by Avalara (e.g., “Germany B2B via PEPPOL”, etc.). For the Avalara integration to work, you need to first activate the mandates you will use.
• Generate credentials for the integration setup.
  • In Avalara, go to the Integrations section > License key and client secrets tab and click the Create key button to generate your Client ID and Client Secret. You will need the Client ID and Client Secret when setting up the connection between Scoro and Avalara.

Additionally, make sure to set up the following settings in Scoro before you integrate it with Avalara:

• Tax/VAT number: Ensure your company’s Tax/VAT number is filled in under Settings > Site settings > My company data and logo to ensure valid submissions.
• Invoice list bookmarks: Bookmarks for invoice lists are required when using automatic or manual bulk syncIf you’ll use the automatic or manual bulk sync, you need to set up invoice list bookmarks that will be used as routing rules to the correct mandates.

Once you’ve completed all the above requirements, you can proceed with connecting Avalara to Scoro.

4. Connecting Avalara to Scoro

To connect your Avalara account to Scoro:

1. First, activate the free Avalara integration add-on under Settings > Administration > Plan, add-ons and billing.
2. Once you’ve activated the add-on, go to Settings > Site settings > Integrations and click on Avalara.
   
3. Click the Connect to Avalara button.
   
4. Enter the Client ID and Client secret that you generated in Avalara. 
5. Enable the Connect to sandbox environment toggle if you’d like to use your Avalara sandbox environment for testing and configuration purposes, or disable it for live, legally binding submissions. Then, click Next.
   
   Note! If you get the invalid_client error, double-check whether the credentials you've entered are valid and try again.
   
6. Lastly, you’ll see all the Avalara companies you’ve created – choose the one corresponding to the Scoro entity you are currently in. Then click Connect to complete the connection between both platforms.

Once you’ve connected Avalara to Scoro, the Avalara integration settings page will open, with the Avalara company you just connected to stated at the top of the page. You can proceed with configuring the integration settings.

5. Configuring the integration settings

After establishing the connection between Scoro and Avalara, we recommend configuring the integration settings and other items in Scoro under Settings > Site settings > Integrations > Avalara in the following order:

1. Data sync settings – choose the sync direction and other basic settings related to data synchronization
2. Field mapping – before you can proceed with mandate mapping, you need to map out Scoro fields to the standardized codes that the mandates will use.
3. Bookmarks – used during automatic or manual bulk sync to identify invoices for sync and route them to the correct mandates.
4. Mandate mapping – once you've mapped out the fields, you can map out the mandates you’ll use.

5.1. Data sync settings

In the Settings section, choose what data to synchronize:

• Invoices and credit invoices – enable this toggle to sync your Scoro invoices to Avalara.
• Bills & Credit bills – enable this toggle to pull inbound bills from Avalara to Scoro. Use the Start date picker to set the bill sync start date.

In the Sync settings section, you can customize the synchronization settings further:

• Synchronization – choose between automatic or manual sync from the dropdown field:
  • With the automatic sync, you can choose between hourly, daily, weekly, or monthly automatic synchronization.
  • With the manual sync, the data synchronization is triggered by using the Quick actions button on the specific document.
• Quick-add buttons can be used by – use this dropdown to control what users can sync invoices to Avalara or view logs. You can select either all users, admin users, or specific permission sets.
• Send error notifications to – enter an email address where you want to receive the alerts if a sync fails. Only one email address can be added here.
• Link bills in Scoro with – select the user you want to set as the author (owner) for the bills and credit bills synced from Avalara to Scoro.
• For PEPPOL mandates, you’ll also need to configure the following sender identifiers (you can find these identifiers in Avalara on the mandates you activated):
  • Supplier SchemeID – enter the type of ID being used (e.g., 0208 for Belgium).
  • Supplier endpointID – enter the specific identifier number. It typically starts with the country code followed by around 10 digits – for example, EE1234567890.

5.2. Field mapping

Most of Scoro’s fields and their values are written in “human” language; however, Avalara mandates require specific, standardized code lists for the e-invoicing format. For example, the Scoro unit pcs might need to be mapped to UN/CEFACT “C62”. To ensure Avalara understands the invoice data from Scoro, you need to create field mapping groups for the mandates you’ll use.

If you’ll use multiple similar mandates (e.g., Germany and Belgium PEPPOL), you’ll be able to reuse the same field-mapping group for all of them.

Currently, you can map out the following Scoro fields:

• Unit (mandatory)
• Tax category (mandatory)
• Document type (mandatory)
• Payment method (optional)

To create a new field mapping group:

1. In the Field mapping section, click the Add mapping button.
2. Enter the name of the new field mapping. We recommend naming them so it’s easy to distinguish which mandate the field mapping group will be used for, especially if you will use many mandates that require different field mapping groups.
3. Click on the Scoro field you want to map out (Unit, Tax category, Document type, or Payment method) and enter the standardized codes in the New value column.
4. Don’t forget to save the changes you’ve made in the integration settings – otherwise, the field mapping you’ve done will be lost!

Once you’ve completed the field mapping for the mandates you’ll be using, they will be added to mandate mappings, and they can’t be unmapped from there. Payment methods also can’t be removed once they’re mapped and added to mandate mappings.

If the payment method needs to be mapped to or retrieved from Avalara, you will need to create a dropdown-type custom field with the input field name set exactly to c_avalara_payment_method. This way, it will become mappable on the field mapping screen. See our Custom fields article for more guidance on creating custom fields.

5.3. Creating bookmarks for routing

The Avalara integration uses invoice list bookmarks to identify and route specific invoices to the correct mandate mapping. Bookmarks are required when using automatic or manual bulk synchronization, but not when syncing individual invoices manually.

If an invoice does not match any of your invoice list bookmarks, it simply stays in Scoro and is not synced to Avalara.

For more information about managing bookmarks, see our How to use bookmarks article.

5.4. Mandate mapping

A mandate mapping is the ‘bridge’ that tells Scoro which documents to send to Avalara and how to translate your Scoro data into a compliant format.

You can create mappings not just for activated mandates, but also for mandates you haven’t activated in Avalara yet, which lets you prepare ahead of time. Such mandates will appear in the Avalara integration settings in Scoro as Inactive, and no invoices will be sent through before you activate them.

To add a mandate:

1. On the Avalara integration settings page, click the Add a mandate button on the invoice or bill row, depending on which document types the mandate applies to. If there are already active or inactive mandates there, you can click the Add mandate button below them to add a new one, or click the copy mandate button (clipboard icon) to duplicate an existing one.
   
2. Set up the primary details for your mandate:
   • Name – give the mandate mapping a unique, descriptive name (e.g., Germany B2B – PEPPOL).
   • Mandate – select the specific country/use case mandate provided by Avalara (e.g., DE-B2B-PEPPOL).
   • Bookmark – choose a Scoro bookmark so that the integration can identify which invoices should be sent with this specific mandate during automatic or manual bulk syncs. 
   • Field mapping – select the field mapping group you created for this specific mandate to translate units and tax codes.
   • Description (optional) – enter a brief description of the mandate.
3. Once you have selected a mandate from the dropdown, various data input fields required by the selected mandate will appear below all the primary details. Scoro has pre-filled the mandatory fields to save you time – and for most cases, you likely won’t need to do much additional mapping. However, you can always configure additional mappings if you have specific requirements beyond the standard setup. Click the View button and select Conditional, Optional, or All to see the additional fields you can configure.
   • For each field, you can see:
     • Field Name/path: The technical identifier for the e-invoice (e.g., Invoice/cbc:IssueDate).
     • Description: An explanation of what information the field requires.
     • Type: The data format expected for that field, such as string (text) or date.
     • Field in Scoro: The specific Scoro variable currently mapped to this Avalara field (e.g., mapping Invoice/cbc:ID to the Scoro variable Invoice number).
   • For every mandate field, you must decide where the information comes from in Scoro:
     • Native Scoro fields: Pull data from invoice headers, lines, buyer/seller details, or contact persons.
     • Custom fields: If you have unique business data stored in Scoro custom fields, you can map those directly.
     • Fixed values: Use these for fixed values, such as a "VAT" label for the TaxScheme ID field.
     • Field mapping templates: Pull the translated codes (like "C62" for units) from your lookup tables.
       
4. Once your fields are mapped, click Apply to save the mandate configuration. Don’t forget to save the changes you made in the Avalara integration settings page – otherwise, the mandate configuration you’ve done will be lost!

You can edit the mandates you’ve configured by clicking the Edit mandate button (pencil icon) on the mandate row.

6. Syncing invoices and bills

Once you’ve configured the integration settings and set your Avalara integration to use the production environment, you can proceed to sync your Scoro invoices to Avalara.

See our dedicated articles about syncing invoices to Avalara and syncing bills to Scoro for more guidance.

7. Viewing integration logs

The Logs tab in the Avalara integration settings page can be used to debug issues if you experience any. You’ll find request and response details (headers and payloads) here in case you may need to share them with Avalara support. You can use the following fields to look up specific logs more easily:

• From and To – specify the time frame
• Direction – select Outbound for invoice sync logs or Inbound for bill sync logs.
• Search – enter a specific search keyword.

8. Disconnecting the integration

To disconnect the Avalara integration:

1. In Scoro, go to Settings > Site settings > Integrations > Avalara.
2. Click the Disconnect button.

Once disconnected, document sync and invoice submission will stop until the integration is reconnected.