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Vertex is best of the best!
December 21, 2022

Vertex is best of the best!

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Software Version

Vertex Indirect Tax O Series

Overall Satisfaction with Vertex

We use Vertex O series On Demand for Sales and Purchase transactions at Covestro and at Bayer Corp. Covestro LLC is a Chemical company, with a BIG presence in Texas. At Bayer Corp we used it for Healthcare, Animal Health, CropScience, and Chemicals and had a presence in many States. We support US Sales and Use tax, Canadian VAT tax, and Vertex Consulting (Hal Burchfield) assisted us with a VAT implementation for a number of EU countries. At Covestro LLC, we may be interested in a Brazil implementation when we begin our S4 Hana upgrade project in 2024.
  • Great monthly updates of rates and rules and locations
  • A very flexible tool for user defined decision making
  • Ability to customize for specific scenarios that may be specific to our Company
  • We pay Vertex compliance to put numbers on our Tax returns. Tax manager would like them to pick up our monthly files rather than him having to supply them. I'm not sure if that will ever happen, but the Tax manager said he never has to massage the data.....just gathers the Tax2000 reports and provides.
  • Would like to see some of the LCR Dixon tools to become part of the standard delivered functionality now that Susi is part of Vertex now. Especially the New testing tool. I asked about this at conference, but they are still evaluating all that.
  • We have had positive return on Investment in the area of Cash flow. We have a BIG presence in Texas, and wejust implemented percentage-based reporting there, based upon a managed Audit performed by our partner Grant Thornton and the State of Texas. Once the State and Grant Thornton determined our specific percentages, we were able Iin house) to apply certain percentages to Texas purchases of certain material groups before applying the standard Texas tax rates. We did this through the use of a Lookup table and a series of Tax assist rules. We now keep more money in house instead of sending it to the State, only to get it back under Audit. Cash flow is King and this change made a huge difference, that our upper-level management noticed!
  • As we have expanded our presence in new States due to acquisition, we can quickly make adjustments that are needed to tax the way we want. IT and Corporate Tax have an excellent working relationship to make needed changes that allow us to keep our finger on the pulse of tax calculation and expected tax results.
  • Tax content support
  • Tax accuracy
  • Reporting
Many of these factors are equally important in decisions to purchase Vertex. I have seen some other tax calculation engines and Vertex is the best of the best!
Vertex is easier to use and to configure.

Do you think Vertex delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Vertex's feature set?

Yes

Did Vertex live up to sales and marketing promises?

I wasn't involved with the selection/purchase process

Did implementation of Vertex go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Vertex again?

Yes

I have been using this tool for 23 years now and have forged a wonderful relationship with the heavy hitters at Vertex. They are always helpful and when I pick up the phone with a specific question, they answer!! I am trustful of the software and the people at Vertex. I never want to use another tax calculation software. Vertex is second to none!!

Vertex Feature Ratings

Type of tax
9.7
Sales and Use Taxes
10
Cross-border Taxes
10
VAT / GST Taxes
9
Tax Reporting & Compliance
9.2
3rd-Party Software Integrations
9
Tax Data Reporting
9
Compliance Administration Management
9
Tax Exemption Processing
9
Tax Document Management
10
Complex Tax Scenario Management
9

Using Vertex

5 - 2 Corporate tax dept employees, 1 IT Dept employee with a few for backup, a few business users for Tax Area ID lookup
2 - 2 main people. Tax Dept manager and 1 main IT person, with others for backup
  • S & U Tax calculation and VAT determination
  • Tax Area ID location determination for asset location
  • Exemption certificate management - although only used as a file cabinet
  • perhaps exemption certificate wizard for customer input of information
  • perhaps for Brazil tax determination and calculation in future S4 Hana project
  • More detailed functionality in exemption certificate manager
As a company, we are committed to using Vertex

Evaluating Vertex and Competitors

Vertex Implementation

Ensure that Corporate Tax has a seat at the table, along with trusted IT colleagues who will support it going forward.
  • Third-party professional services
Covestro LLC is 2014 spin off of Bayer Corporation's Chemical division, formerly known as Bayer Material Science. Originally Deloitte assisted Bayer Corporation with the initial implementation of SAP and Vertex, starting in 1999. Later throughout years of implementations of various divisions of Bayer Corporation onto SAP/Vertex, Ducharme McMilan and Associate assisted. Most recently, after becoming Covestro LLC, Grant Thornton assisted Covestro's corporate Tax dept, with a redesign and fine tuning of their tax determination.
Yes - Initial implementation of SAP/VERTEX, then separate divisions brought onto both systems.
Change management was a big part of the implementation and was well-handled - Assisting the business with correct material group assignment on purchases. Directing Accounts Payable with correct way to process vendor payments for tax decision making.
  • Master Data cleansing
  • Tax Area ID issues......mainly tax area id deletions
  • ensuring that our Audit finding were reflected in the system, when they did not agree to the standard tax decision making. We created some user defined conditional rules to assist with this

Vertex Training

  • In-Person Training
Attended Vertex classes long ago in year 2000 or 2001, have attended many Exchanges throughout the years, and done some online classes as well in Vertex community.

Configuring Vertex

know your system intimately......sometimes a Tax Assist rule is not needed, just a new mapping.
Some - we have done small customizations to the interface - prior to Vertex accelerator, our programmers had to add code to pass certain data points in SAP to use for decision making in VERTEX
Some - we have added small pieces of custom code - When I say custom code, I mean we have added user defined tax categories and user defined condition records as needed.

Vertex Support

ProsCons
Quick Resolution
Good followup
Knowledgeable team
Problems get solved
Kept well informed
Support cares about my success
Quick Initial Response
None
No did not purchase premium support. Our IT dept and Tax manager provides premium support
Yes - I have not heard back on the bug we identified in September 2022 to Sam
Babikian at Connector Support. It had to do with a Rollback problem. We had a Teams meeting with a number of Vertex folks who agreed this bug was a big deal and would take a while to be fixed. Here is some info on it.....
Joachim Schmitz from Covestro LLC said......Unfortunately you misunderstood my example, so I amended
some necessary information, the application is a Covestro self-created program
/COV/…, which is using the BAPI in the middle of some statements:


1. Inserting
a line (#1) into a SAP table /COV/MF_OBJLOCK


2. Call
the official SAP posting BAPI “BAPI_ACC_DOCUMENT_POST” generating doc#1 (which
implicitly calls your /VERTEX function)


3. Inserting
a line (#2) into SAP table /COV/MF_OBJLOCK


4. Normally
a “BAPI_TRANSACTION_COMMIT” should be done, but imagine an error detected by
the /COV program, which requires a ROLLBACK WORK, or a Dump is generated due to
an error, which performs an implicit ROLLBACK WORK



The ROLLBACK WORK in point 4. should rollback all
changes done so far (lines #1 and #2 in /COV/MF_OBJLOCK and posting #1).

But as your /VERTEX function implicitly used in point 2.
“STARTING NEW TASK”, an implicit COMMIT WORK was done.

Result is an inconsistency in /COV/MF_OBJLOCK !





Within SAP BAPIs it’s forbidden to do commit work. This is
for consistency reasons.


Please check again!

Using Vertex

some aspects are easy to use and some more difficult
ProsCons
Like to use
Relatively simple
Easy to use
Well integrated
Consistent
Quick to learn
Convenient
Feel confident using
Requires technical support
  • mapping of material groups to Vertex tax categories
  • reporting capabilities
  • sometimes Tax Assist rule creation - depending on complexity
  • creation of User defined condition records

Vertex Reliability

can use it out of the box or highly customize it.....whatever you decide
I have always felt VERTEX support was available when needed, and I have felt comfortable calling in some heavy hitters when needed.
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.

Integrating Vertex

We had good experiences integrating Vertex with Ariba
  • S4 Hana upgrade of our ERP system
I don't have anything on the radar except for our S4 Hana upgrade
  • File import/export
get in the game early

Relationship with Vertex Inc.

I was not involved in the negotiation process at Covestro and cannot comment here
work with you CSR to escalate any issues not being addressed in a timely manner with the proper Vertex resource

Upgrading Vertex

  • Upgrade of Vertex Accelerator is painful
  • our system people must first upgrade SIC and Jco on our new AWS servers and it does not seem to be straightforward for them.
  • I just hope it is stable and keeps working without surprises