So, both Epicor and Avalara support have been useless with this.
I’m having intermittent issues when trying to connect to AvaTax through Epicor.
When I click the “Test Connection” button in the company config, it will validate successfully every other attempt. So, it will validate, fail, validate, fail, etc.
It fails with this message:
I have never seen something work every other time consistently before. Anyone have any idea what’s going on?
Our network guy set up a rule to bypass web filtering and it validated every time. We’re gonna set up a rule to allow Avalara through and should be good.
We had intermittent connection issues with Avalara about a year or so ago. Turned out that someone had reused a piece of network equipment (a switch, router, firewall, or something), and failed to clear some previous settings, and it would occasionally FUBAR the communications with Avalara. Real pain in the ass to find.
Ask avalara support for a website exception list for your firewalls/router. Add them in and test again. If it still fails you may have a routing issue inside your network or with your ISP. Its not unheard of for an ISP to have a wonky router. Once you know the sites you can set a monitoring program to check availability, when you find one(s) that fail run a continuous tracert on that url until you find a consistent break in the connection. Best to do it from the actual server communicating but it should work fine from the same host if you are virtual.
They also have an sdk you can use to directly access your services. We used it about 10 years ago to enable tax calculations on quotes.
I used tracert in diagnosing our problem. When I ran it from anywhere outside our network (like from my home ISP), it would get to Avalera in just a few (2-4) hops. But from inside our network it would sometimes take 30+.
Emphasis on sometimes.
One other test I’ve done is to open a browser in developer mode, and load the page
https://avatax.avalara.net/ (make sure to use https) and refresh a couple of times.
The screen shot below shows 5 requests of that page. The first taking much longer, and the last actually failed.
Had to add Avalara’s URL to the web filtering something or other (don’t know the details), but it’s working now.
