The Avalara Knowledge Center provides detailed information about how to set up a company, including the information you need to collect, adding your company information, and specifying where you’ll collect taxes.

For the purposes of this integration guide, we'll walk through the setup process for creating a company in your Sandbox environment. Technology partners can create a test company with generic information; API customers may want to use their actual company information.

Sign in to your Avalara Sandbox environment.

Check your email for the confirmation that you received from Avalara when you signed up for your account.

Sign in to your account using the username and password in your confirmation email.

Follow the prompts to create a new password.

Select I accept to the Terms and Conditions.

Select Get started to begin the walk through for adding a company. This information isn’t verified, so technology partners can specify a generic name and taxpayer ID.
1. Enter your company's legal name.
2. Enter the company phone number.
3. Disable the My company's primary business location is in the US checkbox.
4. For this guide, specify the country of primary location to be in the UK.
5. Enter a business ID (BIN), taxpayer ID (EIN), and IOSS Registration number for this company.
6. Accept the remaining defaults, then select Next.

Enter a mailing address for your company, then select Next. AvaTax enables calculation of VAT/GST and customs duty in the UK and will specify that the company is an establishment. Accept the default values, then select Yes, add more countries to collect and pay tax in other regions.

When prompted with, Are you registered to collect and pay sales and use tax in the US?, select No, as this isn't necessary for the examples in this guide.

In the Add countries where you collect VAT/GST page, select the EU countries and Switzerland, then click Add selected countries at the bottom of the page.

AvaTax will prompt you to review tax collection and establishment information for each country. Enable establishment for the following countries only and disable establishment in the others:
- Estonia
- Switzerland
- Germany

On the Where you collect tax page, review the regions in the VAT/GST tab. From this page, you can add VAT tax IDs for each jurisdiction. Add tax IDs for the countries listed below. Include the VAT country two-digit ISO code prefix with each tax ID (for example “DE123456789"). Select Done with tax jurisdictions after adding the VAT tax IDs.
- Estonia
- Switzerland
- Germany
- France
- Netherlands

Finally, select Activate company to begin using AvaTax.

Advice: You can create multiple company profiles within a single AvaTax account. If you create multiple company profiles, you must designate one as the default company. AvaTax uses company codes to designate which company profile processes the transaction. When creating transactions in AvaTax, if you don't specify a company code, then AvaTax uses the default company to process that transaction.

Advice: You can set up a hierarchy of companies in a parent-child relationship. More information about adding child companies is available in the Set up a hierarchy of subsidiary companies topic later in this guide.

Create and activate a company