Likelihood to Recommend In our case, sales and use tax are a must-have. With the recent change and continuous change in tax law, companies find it harder to comply with tax without a system. In our case, managing thousands of customers with thousands of tax codes - city tax, state tax, zone tax - proves to be a challenge. We need a system to minimize any exposure with federal and state tax law, and certainly protect us from an audit.
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 They are good at updating the tax tables with all the new sales tax law changes They are good at charging the correct sales tax amount as long as the software is set up or configured correctly They are good at following up at sales tax correspondences 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 admin portal needs work - I cannot simply add and remove users, and have to create a case support. I think this is a low-hanging fruit Sovos is working on to resolve. The UI could be improved. The sync does not always happen instantly and sometime can take up to 24 hours. 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 For the most part, the support team is responsive. However, with the recent switch from a legacy server to S1 server, Sovos created a problem for us. We simply can't upload a tax certificate. I logged a case with support, and they could not help, so they escalate to their senior technician. All in all, it has been more than 7 days, and they could not resolve a "simple" issue.
Read full review 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 I have used sales tax tables in the past and they are a lot more accurate as long as the configuration is done correctly up front. I have also used Avalara. Avalara has a more consumer friendly interface and better reporting function
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 It saved us a lot of time and money but eliminating the manpower needed to process manually ourselves It helped reduce the time needed to follow up and resolve sales tax correspondences It helped reduce costs and time to register in new taxing jurisdications 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