Tax audits and findings

An audit compares the marketplace revenue Fours holds for a period with the tax documents in your connected provider, and produces one finding per invoice: the sale is covered by a matching tax record, has none, disagrees with its record, or has tax recorded twice. The Audit tab is where you run audits and work through the findings; Runs keeps the history.

Overview

Open Tax → Sales Tax → Audit. Above the findings, the header shows your provider and its connection state, and when the last audit ran and how many revenue records it scanned. The Audit tab’s badge counts the Uncovered, Ambiguous, and Duplicate findings of the most recent run.

Before the first audit, the tab shows a single Run audit for month button for the most recent complete calendar month. If Tax shows a setup screen instead, finish Set up Tax first.

Below the coverage card, the findings table lists one row per finding:

Run an audit

1. In Auditing, pick a period: one of the last 12 complete calendar months, or Custom range… with a Start date and an End date (exclusive) — the end date itself is not included. Months and dates are UTC.
2. Select Run audit. You need the Admin or Editor role; for a Viewer the button is disabled with “You need editor permission to run an audit.”
3. Wait while the panel shows Auditing period… with the elapsed time. Findings appear when the run completes; you can leave the tab and come back.

To audit the same period again — after a correction, or after your provider’s records changed — select Re-run audit on the coverage card. The Audit tab then shows the newest run’s findings for the period; corrections already made stay in the Action history.

When an audit won’t start. The run is refused, with the reason under “Couldn’t start the audit”, when no selling entity is selected, when the selected entity no longer exists in the provider, or when the provider reports no active tax registration for it. Fix the cause in Settings or in your provider, then run again.

When an audit fails. The panel reads Audit failed for period with Try again. If only some revenue channels failed to load, the run still completes and the Audit tab warns “Some revenue sources didn’t load — their coverage is unknown.” — the coverage figures then describe only the channels that loaded.

What an audit reads

Revenue. Revenue records from AWS, Azure, GCP, and Snowflake — the same records as Revenue Records. Stripe revenue is not audited. A sale belongs to the period of its invoice date, and a refund to the period of its own refund date, so a refund is audited separately from the sale it reverses. Records that carry no invoice-level detail produce no finding.

The taxable amount. Each sale is compared on its revenue excluding any tax already inside the invoice amount:

Marketplace-collected tax. Under marketplace-facilitator rules, the marketplace — not you — collects and remits the tax on many sales. Fours marks a sale as marketplace-collected per channel:

A marketplace-collected sale still needs a record in your provider — with your own tax liability at zero. Seller tax charged on top of marketplace-collected tax is tax collected twice; Fours detects it only on records it created itself, so check records you filed by other means yourself.

Tax records. Every committed tax document for your selling entity in Avalara for the period. A record Fours itself created through a correction is recognized directly, without matching.

How a finding gets its status

Fours pairs invoices and provider records as a whole, choosing the assignment that matches the most invoices, rather than taking the first record that fits each invoice.

Additional labels on a status:

• Partner handled / marketplace-collected — the marketplace collected the tax on this sale, so your own liability is zero.
• Ignored — someone set the finding aside (see Ignore a finding).

Tax type. Each finding shows the tax family for the buyer’s country: Sales Tax (United States), GST/HST (Canada), Consumption Tax (Japan), GST (Australia, Singapore, India), or VAT (EU countries, United Kingdom, South Korea, Israel). A country outside these has no tax type and shows —.

Work the findings

The findings table has four queues: All results, Uncovered, Ambiguous, and Duplicate. There is no Covered queue — covered findings are under All results.

• Filter by Cloud Partner and by Region / tax type, and search by company, revenue record ID, or invoice ID. Your queue, filters, and search are kept in the window’s address, so a link to it opens the same view.
• Columns: Status, Company, Invoice, Cloud Partner, Country, Tax type, Revenue, Tax, Period, and Tax record. Tax reads collected by partner on a marketplace-collected sale; Tax record reads — None — when no record matched.
• The table shows 25 invoice groups per page — a sale together with its refunds — so a page can hold more than 25 rows.
• Export downloads the current queue, filters, and search as CSV.

Select Take actions on a row (Review for a covered one) to open the finding.

The finding page

The page shows the buyer, status, channel, and invoice, then:

1. Recommended — what Fours concluded and the one correction it recommends, with the correction’s form right in the card: for example No matching tax record, Field discrepancy, Tax collected twice, Marketplace facilitator collected the tax, or Period already filed. See Corrections.
2. Ignore this finding — see below.
3. Revenue, Tax, and Jurisdiction, followed by a field-by-field comparison of Fours’ figures with the provider record — or, for a marketplace-collected sale, the record Fours proposes.

The open finding is part of the window’s address, like the queue and filters, so you can paste its link into a ticket or a chat and a colleague opens the same finding; the Back to control returns you to the list you came from. An entry in Action history and an amended return have links of their own too. Audits replace their results, so a link can outlive the finding it names — the page then says This finding no longer exists. A link opened in an organization that hasn’t connected a tax provider says No tax provider connected and offers Go to settings.

Ignore a finding

Ignore this finding sets a finding aside without changing anything in your provider: it leaves its queue and that queue’s export, but stays under All results, labeled Ignored. It is not offered on a covered finding, and needs the Admin or Editor role.

The filed-period banner

When findings fall in a period Fours considers already filed with the tax authority, the Audit tab says so: ”… has already been filed with the tax authority. Discrepancies in a filed period can’t be corrected instantly — open a finding to flag it for an amended return.” See Amended returns.

Runs

Tax → Sales Tax → Runs lists past audits, newest first, under Audit runs:

The list is read-only: rows don’t open, and Run a new audit takes you to the Audit tab to choose a period. It shows the 50 most recent runs. If a run is still New or Running more than five minutes after it was created, opening the list checks whether it is actually still running; a run that has stopped is marked Failed then. A run that really is still working stays Running.

Ask AI

The Ask AI panel on the right of every Tax screen answers questions about what you are looking at. It hides automatically when the window is narrow; Show assistant brings it back.

• It can read the current screen — on a list, up to 25 visible rows — explain a finding, open the recommended correction and fill in its fields, offer quick choices, and search the knowledge sources you attach.
• It cannot submit a correction or change anything, navigate for you (it gives you a link instead), choose a tax code, calculate a tax amount or rate, change a finding’s status, or answer a tax-law question without a knowledge source that covers it.

Edit assistant sets your model and knowledge sources and lets you discard the conversation. These choices are yours alone; they don’t change the assistant for anyone else.

KPI calculation formulas

The same formulas apply to every audited channel — AWS, Azure, GCP, and Snowflake. Only the taxable amount of a finding differs by channel, as defined in What an audit reads.

Related

• Corrections — fix what the audit found.
• Amended returns — discrepancies in filed periods.
• Revenue Records — the revenue an audit reads.