Likelihood to Recommend Amazon SageMaker is a great tool for developing machine learning models that take more effort than just point-and-click type of analyses. The software works well with the other tools in the Amazon ecosystem, so if you use Amazon Web Services or are thinking about it, SageMaker would be a great addition. SageMaker is great for consumer insights, predictive analytics, and looking for gems of insight in the massive amounts of data we create. SageMaker is less suitable for analysts who do generally "small" data analyses, and "small" data analyses in today's world can be billions of records.
Read full review Vertex is pretty diverse in that it can support large or small organizations. If you're looking for a robust tax calculation engine then Vertex is a great option. It offers the sales and use tax calculations, reporting that supports all tax types and that can be used organization wide, and the ability to prepare the required sales tax returns. They keep up on all the tax rules so you don't have to and their customer service is good as well. At this point I've not found a reason that it wouldn't be suited in a tax environment.
Read full review Pros Provides enough freedom for experienced data scientists and also for those who just need things done without going much deeper into building models. Customization and easy to alter and change. If you already are an Amazon user, you do not need to transition over to another software. Read full review Vertex does a great job of building in-house industry expertise (leasing in our case) so they truly understand the tax technical and compliance obstacles we face day to day. Vertex actively solicits for and responds to customer feedback on development and product roadmap suggestions. The Leasing users group is an example where Vertex takes an active role in communicating with and taking feedback from our industry. Vertex tax updates are very timely and thorough, which makes the compliance process less stressful for our team. Read full review Cons The UI can be eased up a bit for use by business analysts and non technical users For huge amount of data pull from legacy solutions, the platform lags a bit Considering ML is an emerging topic and would be used by most of the organizations in future, the pipeline integrations can be optimized Read full review Reporting: Vertex VAT Compliance is not fully ready to support all EU country's requirements. Data storage. Online reporting in VVC: many countries require to report VAT Declaration in an electronic way. This function is still missing for some of the countries from VVC. Read full review Likelihood to Renew We are satisfied with the overall performance of Vertex. The software has provided my company with many efficiencies. We have shorted our audits and found that many audits are happy that we are using Vertex to calculate our taxes. We no longer need to worry about updating our rates each month since Vertex sends us a file to upload
Read full review Usability We have very complicated tax rules for our business, which took some time to set up in Vertex's software, but now it is running almost perfectly smoothly, but there are still sales orders that we need to go in and check the difference in sales tax since we are using two different systems. Without being in two different systems I wouldn't see any need for manual adjustments to sales orders
Read full review Reliability and Availability I have always felt VERTEX support was available when needed, and I have felt comfortable calling in some heavy hitters when needed
Read full review Performance Our Vertex performance is good, although we are now experiencing Error 502 when adding additional data points to our transaction tester single tests. At Exchange, I was told to reach out to support....that most likely the On Demand system needed some additional CPU resource added. I have a currently open ticket, that has not yet been fixed on this matter
Read full review Support Rating I cannot speak from personal experience, but our IT staff has found contacting Vertex support staff to be challenging. One coworker has gone through several support tickets because he was an unrecognized contact. He has also expressed frustration that communication with support staff is conducted solely by email, drawing out issues over an extended length of time that could be more easily resolved by a brief phone call.
Read full review In-Person Training By training I'm referring to our engagement with Vertex Consulting's professional services group. Each person on the engagement had prior leasing industry tax experience and most if not all used O Series before joining Vertex. Consultants with industry specific tax experience provide so much more than just "training". They are able to engage in deep tax technical discussions with actual experience while in private practice. This coupled with having visibility to how numerous other leasing peers approach similar tax issues is a huge plus on top of the standard training.
Read full review Online Training Vertex has offered multiple webinars for the products we have purchased that are informative and helpful. I've also attended a few of the Vertex annual conferences where I was able to strength my knowledge of Vertex. I also found that their online library and videos can be helpful in resolving issues and answering questions.
Read full review Implementation Rating The implementation is challenging, make no mistake but will provide much value over time. Make sure you have full support of IT and your major stakeholders in your company. I found that while many people claimed to understand tax was important, they had no idea how deep tax in entrenched throughout the lease life cycle.
Read full review Alternatives Considered Amazon SageMaker comes with other supportive services like S3, SQS, and a vast variety of servers on EC2. It's very comfortable to manage the process and also support the end application by one click hosting option. Also, it charges on the base of what you use and how long you use it, so it becomes less costly compared to others.
Read full review For Sales tax many years ago I had used a product called Alternadev. It probably doesn't even exist anymore. It was created in someones kitchen and there wasn't much support. Other than that for sales tax I have only used Vertex. I have used
ONESOURCE but that was for property tax
Read full review Scalability There needs to be a time-consuming setup both in the Enterprise Resource Platform and in Vertex and the related tools as well but once this is all established, Vertex is very proficient at calculating Sales and Use Tax in the USA and in Canada with GST/HST, as well as several of the provinces where we are located. As we added plants in different jurisdictions via greenfield expansion and aquisition, Vertex was able to integrate those as long as the tax department is fully informed of the system.
Read full review Return on Investment We have been able to deliver data products more rapidly because we spend less time building data pipelines and model servers. We can prototype more rapidly because it is easy to configure notebooks to access AWS resources. For our use-cases, serving models is less expensive with SageMaker than bespoke servers. Read full review We use Vertex on a monthly basis to see if tax has been over-accrued or over-charged on invoices. We do save tax every month using the tool. Not at liberty to share too much more - the technology does assist the human efforts. Read full review ScreenShots