Vertex is a Must for Large SAP Companies

We sell high volume and Vertex is used to calculate tax for all sales. We have customers that provide tax exemption certificates for different states and Vertex helps set the taxability on the customer level for those and helps save the backup in a tax system repository. There is a good process in place now and the customer has to say up front if they are taxable or exempt and documentation is provided. Vertex also accurately calculates cross-border Canadian transactions as well as tax sourcing and where the tax should be administered.

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.

Vertex does a great job of the standard transactions but it takes a long time to set up and there are always tweaks that need to happen because there are differences in the company, industry, and the IT infrastructure of the business. We still have to make adjustments based on specific company transactions which is normal because of the uniqueness of the system. We still have to rely on Vertex consulting to help with some of the tweaks and would like to do some of it ourselves but it is very complex at times.

We went from manual tax rate selection via table to having Vertex automatically populate tax rates for both Sales and Purchases. For Purchases and AP, we had individual AP processors as well as buyers, procurement, and local accounting personnel manually review each AP Invoice, determine taxability, and use specific tax codes that would accrue for the plant jurisdiction. For sales, it was similar where each salesperson would have to determine the taxability of the transaction, determine whether each customer had a tax exemption on file, and pick an appropriate tax rate that would determine tax for the transaction. Vertex works great to remove the manual selection of tax rates and automates the taxability of transactions.