Validating Addresses for External Tax Calculation

If your organization is enabled for external tax calculation, you can validate the following addresses to check that they are recognized by the US Postal Service:

  • Company Address if the company's record type is SUT
  • Account Billing Address
  • Account Shipping Address

Validation is performed by an external system such as AvaTax. See Setting up External Tax Calculation for details of the setup required. If your organization is not enabled for external tax calculation, validating an address will have no effect and a message will be displayed telling you that external tax calculation is not enabled.

When you validate one of these addresses, if the original address is invalid (for example, because of formatting issues) an updated version of the address is proposed. You can then do one of the following:

  • Accept the new address
  • Edit the new address then revalidate it
  • Go back to the company or account record, retaining the original address.

If you edit an address after it has been validated, its Validated checkbox is deselected to indicate that the latest address has not been validated.

Note:

An address can still be used for tax calculation if it has not been validated, or if it has failed validation (for example, because it is a new property and has not yet been added to the US Postal Service database). But it is best practice to validate these addresses prior to calculating tax, and to correct any details that can be corrected. Validating addresses is especially important in SUT companies.