Avalara provides two different environments for AvaTax: Sandbox and Production. Each environment is completely separate, and each has its own credentials. If you have a Sandbox account, you can't use that account to sign in to Production and vice versa.

Tip

When you receive your credentials, it’s important to record the account number, name, and type. We keep Sandbox and Production credentials separate to help you test your software in Sandbox without the risk of accidentally affecting production data.

You may want to share your Sandbox credentials with developers, and reserve Production credentials for accountants/financial controllers. Keeping accounts separate helps avoid the risk of reporting test data to a tax authority.


	SANDBOX	PRODUCTION
AvaTax endpoint service	https://sandbox-rest.avatax.com	https://rest.avatax.com
AvaTax website URL	https://sandbox.admin.avalara.com/login	https://admin.avalara.com/login
Tax content	Latest version	Latest version
Monitoring	24/7 monitoring	24/7 monitoring View Avalara status at https://status.avalara.com
Data	All Sandbox data is fully separate from Production data.	All Production data is fully separate from Sandbox data.
Credentials	Production credentials won’t work on Sandbox, so you can't accidentally save real transactions into the Sandbox environment with a production account.	Sandbox credentials won’t work on Production, so you can't accidentally create a test transaction in production with a sandbox account.
Tax filing	Sandbox data is never reported to a tax authority, so you can test your transactions without worrying about accidentally reporting transactions.	Transactions that are marked as `Committed` in production can be reported on a tax filing using the Avalara Managed Returns Service.
Updates	Sandbox generally updates a few days earlier than Production so that customers can experiment with new releases before they go live.	Production is updated a few days to a week after Sandbox so that customers can preview the new release on Sandbox before it’s live.

Sandbox vs Production environments