Chapter 1.2 - Authentication

AvaTax for Communications REST v2 supports basic access authentication. Use a Base64 encoded username:password to authenticate.

Required Headers

These items must appear in your request header:

Key Value
Authorization Basic "{encoded username:password}"
client_id Unique identifier for your company. Avalara provides this during account creation. Your Client ID is the same across all environments.
Content-Type application/json

Encode your Username and Password

Your Customer Portal "{encoded username:password}" is encoded in Base64. For example, if your username is first.last@avalara.com and your password is secretpassword!, use Zmlyc3QubGFzdEBhdmFsYXJhLmNvbTpzZWNyZXRwYXNzd29yZCE= for basic authentication.
You can encode a plaintext string to Base64 in Windows Powershell using the following script:
# Encode a string to Base64
[System.Convert]::ToBase64String(
  [System.Text.Encoding]::UTF8.GetBytes("first.last@avalara.com:secretpassword!"));

Note

Different factors can impact your "{encoded username:password}", namely different username capitalization. Usernames are not case sensitive, but passwords are. Base64 encoded values for usernames first.last@avalara.com and First.Last@avalara.com are different but are treated as being identical behind the scenes during authentication. Base64 encoded values for passwords secretpassword! and SecretPassword! are different and cause authentication to fail because the password is not what is expected.

Optional Headers

Our tax engine allows for additional customization when calculating taxes through client profiles. For details about how client profiles work, see Customizing Transactions. For now, just know that you can pass an additional header to use a specific profile:
Key Value
client_profile_id An integer that specifies which profile you want to use when calculating the taxes in this request

Note

If a client_profile_id is left blank, REST v2 uses the System Default configuration.
PreviousNext