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

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.

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

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

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

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

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