Sandbox vs Production environments

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

Tip

When you receive credentials for AvaTax, 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. Keeping accounts separate helps avoid the risk of reporting test data to a tax authority.

The table below outlines the key differences between Sandbox and Production environments:


	SANDBOX	PRODUCTION
AvaTax endpoint service	https://sandbox-rest.avatax.com	https://rest.avatax.com
AvaTax website URL	https://sandbox.admin.avalara.com	https://admin.avalara.com
Tax Content	Latest version	Latest version
Monitoring	24/7 Monitoring	24/7 MonitoringView Avalara status at https://status.avalara.com/
Data	All Sandbox data are fully separate from Production data.	All Production data are 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	Generally updates a few days earlier than Production so that customers can experiment with new releases before they go live.	Updated a few days to a week after Sandbox so that customers can preview the new release on Sandbox before it is live.