London based Receipt Bank offers Practice Platform, an application supporting SMBs and accounting firms with tracking receipts and expenses and logging them with minimal or no paperwork and data entry in an environment that integrates with popular accounting software (e.g. Quickbooks).
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Vertex
Score 8.4 out of 10
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Vertex combines tax research with technology to improve tax accuracy and
consistency on sales and purchase transactions. The automation aims to support high volume and complex transactions at speed and scale to streamline internal
processes and improve audit performance. Integrations to
ERP, e-commerce, procurement, and other billing systems enables a single tax
engine to seamlessly support a growing business. In addition to tax
determination, Vertex provides tools and services to automate and…
It is great for accounting firms. Easy to add and administer client accounts. Easy to integrate with QuickBooks Online. Easy for clients to capture and submit receipts on the go. It is hard to use for manual data entry, and if your clients frequently have very long receipts the Dext Mobile app does not work well as it compresses the image to the point where it is completely illegible. It does not seem to be designed for business owners to use directly rather than using it through their accounting firm.
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.
Receipt Bank does a stellar job of extracting information from photos of receipts and bills. I'd say 95% of the time the information pulled is correct, so very rarely do I have to correct an amount or date.
One feature I really enjoy is not only the syncing with Quickbooks Online, but the fact that it also pushes the image to Quickbooks Online as an attachment! This means that for every expense/bill processed through Receipt Bank, an image of it is available inside of the transaction inside of Quickbooks Online. This makes researching a breeze.
Receipt Bank makes it very simple for users to add documents to the platform. Each company receives a dedicated Receipt Bank email address, which they can email to and upload documents, or users can use the phone apps (which are really easy to use), or they can upload documents from their computer. Training our clients to use it really can't be any easier!
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.
Receipt Bank Practice Platform has many great features. As they develop the platform I would like to see a rigorous review of all features so as not to add too many and overwhelm my team.
Having the flexibility to pick and choose from a suite of features and implement the ones that best suit my practice. A tailor made Receipt Bank Practice Platform. this would allow my practice to grow into the features rather than be overwhelmed by too many.
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.
Dext is the best way for us to manage our business expenses. Physical and PDF receipts/invoices will be around for a while, but the move to eInvoicing is very good and we look forward to Dext adding this feature
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
Dext Prepare's usability is great, it has lots of functions and you can scan any type of document, including hard copy handwritten documents. It is not very accurate but it is handwritten!! Apart from it, you can use multiple functions like one page at a time, multiple, in bulk. You can send emails with multiple attachments and one of the greatest function is the mobile application capabilities.
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
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
Never used the support function. I guess that means it’s easy to use and works well because I never had an issue in 3 years. Not sure if the support team is helpful.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Receipt Bank is superior to Wave in terms of its accuracy of reporting and allocating expenses. Even though there is a fee for Receipt Bank and Wave is free, the monthly fee for Receipt Bank is well worth the money, given the benefits
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
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.
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.
