About this guide

Welcome to the Avalara E-Invoicing and Live Reporting (ELR) integration guide. This guide describes the steps that you should follow to integrate ELR functionality into your ERP or other business system. Upon completion, your integration will be able to:

Manage companies
Retrieve activation statuses
Submit documents
Check the status of a submitted document (polling or webhooks)
Retrieve a summary of documents sent and received
Store and show business-critical event messages and tax authority or network response values
Download documents in the available formats

The sections in this guide are organized by the functional requirements, in the approximate order that you would encounter them.

For Technology Partners, most sections include references to Certification Requirements to help them understand what needs to be accomplished to earn an Avalara ELR badge. The badge requirements are categorized as follows:

Required: This design element is required to become certified.
Conditional: Depending on your application’s profile, this design element may be required. See the comments column for details.
Suggested: This design element isn’t required for certification, but is recommended to enhance user experience and flexibility.

Certification doesn’t include a code review from Avalara. These requirements are provided to help you create an integration that’s straightforward, uncomplicated, and flexible for implementation partners, professional services organizations, or technical users.

For API customers, we recommend that you follow this guide when using Avalara APIs in your own systems. Typically, you work with an implementation partner to support the integration.

Attention

Avalara’s Technical Partner Services team provides integration support to signed Technology Partners based on the partner’s commitment to develop in accordance with the Certification Requirements. Make sure that all relevant teams are familiar with these requirements before starting development. Partners must provide a solution design document outlining how they’ll meet the Certification Requirements before development begins.
For Avalara Included partners, Avalara’s Technical Partner Services team provides integration support based on the best practices described in this guide and doesn’t include individual mandate-mapping assistance or testing. A separate Avalara Certified Implementation Partner program provides training and support for customer go-live.

Notice

The information provided in this integration guide is based on standard practices. It’s up to each individual developer to determine the applicability of such information and to verify the functionality and use of the information. All information, including examples of code, is provided on an "As-is" basis. Use of Avalara's website is covered by Avalara's site terms located here: https://www.avalara.com/us/en/legal/site-terms.html.