TaxJar vs. Vertex

If you aren't a tax professional, this is a must. Trying to manually calculate which county/city/state sales tax is owed will break your brain. Actually, even if you were a tax professional, why would you want to manually do it when you could just have a tool like this to calculate it for you. I wish it was also affordable to have it file for you and there are some crunchy bits, but its pros definitely outweigh the cons.

Incentivized

It is easy to use, and the user interface is very interactive. A beginner can also work with ease and have no difficulty accessing Vertex. It is straightforward to understand how Vertex works. The tax calculation mechanism is good and accurate.

Incentivized

• The CSV upload for clients that do not have or want to connect directly is very good. It allows us to get a lot of the information done quickly.
• The cost is very competitive.
• According to our clients, the integration is relatively easy.
• For the most part, the reports are accurate.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Continually increase its native integration features with BigCommerce, which recently just opened up more Checkout APIs and Sales Tax APIs.
• The Amazon integration is confusing only because Amazon (sometimes?) calculates and collects sales tax on your behalf. It's not clear what's best-- to let Amazon do it for you or for TaxJar to handle it.
• Onboarding could be a bit easier and guided.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

Great program, but a lot of features are still manual. It's difficult to set recurring monthly reports in a time frame of "Previous Month" and we have to kick them off. We have to manually delete reports, there isn't an option to choose multiple at once. Data that is transferred into Vertex returns is quirky as well, taking multiple steps to update lines of data.

Incentivized

I have always felt VERTEX support was available when needed, and I have felt comfortable calling in some heavy hitters when needed

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

We had a few questions about integrations & onboarding, and support answered quickly and in-depth. They understood our questions - which were a bit technical in nature - and were able to provide an explanation in a timely and specific manner that allowed us to get the system up and running quickly.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

TaxJar is less expensive, simpler to integrate and their billing is straightforward so that you don't have to worry about huge surprises at the end of a month or quarter. They spend a lot less time on sales/marketing but their support is excellent and overall we have had a much better experience with TaxJar.

Incentivized

In comparison specifically with Avalara, Vertex is better in every way. It is much more customizable and allows us to change the way our tax software is set up for our business needs. Avalara is much more constricted, and is using the SST system which can allow for simplified returns, but in our case was causing more problems. Avalara is also much more expensive than Vertex, for less capabilities. Vertex' customer support is much stronger than Avalara's, as they are focused on obtaining and retaining customers whereas Avalara was continually trying to find ways to get money from us

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

• With regards to ROI, it definitely saves time. And time, as they say, is money. It may be hard to put a particular dollar sign on this, but it definitely has provided a positive return.
• It keeps me aware of where I have sales tax nexus that I might not know about otherwise. This is important. Even if I have to check it manually, at least I am made aware of where I need to file.
• It allows me to track how much in sales tax we've paid year over year, which is a good indication of how our sales are doing.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized